College and Research Libraries


without benefit of control groups of more 
normal individuals who need time to think 
and to argue in order to properly assimilate 
the many and varied ideas presented to them 
in the course of a normal college program. 

A section is devoted to the integration of 
areas of knowledge. Two programs are 
described. One of them is a course on foun-
dations of national power given as a portion 
of the Navy V-12 program, first at Princeton 
University, and later at a number of other 
institutions. The course was undoubtedly 
an important one and certainly was needed by 
the future naval officers enrolled in the V -12 
program, but the implication that an inte-
grated course in international relations could 
not or would not have been developed under 
other than Navy auspices, is more than a 
little far-fetched. Collaboration among 
scholars in different disciplines in the teaching 
of integrated courses was already a fact to 
many progressive institutions long before the 
war. 

The other example of the integration of 
areas of knowledge is the so-called C course 
given to pre-meteorology students at seventeen 
different institutions. The course inc1uded 
work in mathematics, physics, history, geogra-
phy, and English. The course was developed 
in conference . by instructors from all of the 
institutions. Examinations were held inde-
pendently and objectively by exammmg 
boards not composed of the men who taught 
the courses. Thus a large number of stu-
dents in seventeen institutions were studying 
a common required curriculum and taking a 
common examination not prepared by their 
instructors. Such cooperation in teaching and 
examination was found in general to be satis-
factory but the observation is made in 
summary that (I) a common required cur-
riculum can be taught well by a number of 
faculty only if the faculty believe in it, and 
(2) a common standard examination always 
invites instructors to coach their pupils rather 

than to teach the subject. Whether or not 
these two disadvantages outweigh the bene-
fit to faculty, institutions, and armed services 
is not stated, nor is evidence presented to 
substantiate one viewpoint or the other. 

The volume ends with a chapter having the 
intriguing title "The Effects of Wartime 
Research upon Institutions of Higher Learn-
ing," but the chapter does not bring out the 
promise suggested in the title. It begins 
with an excellent historical statement, com-
plete with documentation, of the various 
research programs instigated and fostered by 
various government agencies during the war. 
This is interesting and important as a matter 
of record, but nothing of significance is said 
concerning the effect of wartime research on 
the institutions in which the research was 
conducted .• The investigation of this highly 
important and controversial subject was 
based on a fairly general questionnaire sent 
to twenty-nine institutions. The reporting 
here is in the form of fairly random com-
ments from those institutions, all of them 
personal and subjective in nature, presented 
without any attempt at organization. The 
result is a welter of confused personal and 
unidentified opinion. Tabulatioris of these 
random replies would probably result in an 
equal number of comments for and against 
wartime research, providing precisely no evi-
dence on its over-all effect upon institutions 
the country over. 

The book, I repeat, had to be written. 
Too much time, overtime, effort, and more 
effort was expended by thousands of teachers 
and administrators in the wartime job of 
educating young men to do special and im-
portant jobs in the armed services to allow 
these efforts to go unrecorded, and without 
some attempt at evaluation. The recording 
has been done. Th~ evaluation is still want-
ing.-LeRoy Charles Merritt, School of Li-
brarians hip, University of California, Berke-
ley. 

Bosworth of Oberlin 
The Biography of a Mind: Bosworth of 

Oberlin. By Ernest Pye. Chicago, Lake-
side Press, 1948. 2v. $8.oo. Order to Otis 
C. McKee, Oberlin, 0. 
This treatment of the career of a notable 

American religious thinker contains notes 

which merit attention from men and women 
concerned with the discovery and dissemina-
tion of knowledge. They follow from the 
effort, which was prominent with Edward 
Increase Bosworth, to invoke facts and to 
reckon with reality in the interpretation of 

90 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



things spiritual. 
Two chapters entitled "The Scientific 

Spirit in Religious Experience" deal with this 
endeavor, which stood for confidence in the 
potential unity of "intellectual integrity and 
vital religion." They portray the conflicts 
of which Bosworth was conscious as he sur-
veyed the Christian thought of his time; the 
essence of the scientific spirit as it impressed 
him in relation to religious matters; the prin-
ciples he emphasized in making the approach 
to religion both reverent and rational. 

Bosworth aimed at full acceptance of the 
scientific method, but with affirmation that 
much of the truth to be dealt with, even in 
the physical world, is not objectively demon-
strable. Then, holding that negation can 
have small part in a universe which patently 
is developing and expanding, he refused to 
consider it the sole alternative to conviction 
based on positive proofs, and thus left the 
way open for whatever realities intuition and 
informed judgment might identify, after 

scrutiny of the total array of available facts 
and experience. 

The endeavor of Bosworth to view religion 
in the light of science corresponded with the 
contemporary tendency of scientists to discern 
religious significance in their findings. In 
seeking in his own field to accord place to 
all the evidence, he adopted a course which 
hardly can be assailed, even by those who 
might distrust the conclusions likely to follow 
its pursuit in particular cases; or who, spe-
cifically, might not conceive the causative 
energy of creation in terms of a fatherly 
God, as Bosworth did, nor look upon human 
life and personality as the ultimate expression 
of that energy. 

With The Biography of a Mind there is 
published a companion volume captioned The 
Christian Religion and Human Progress, in 
which are assembled various published and 
unpublished addresses of Dr. Bosworth.-
Ernest James Reece, White Plains, New 
York. 

Alabama Author Headings 

Author Headings for the Official Publica-
tions of the State of Alabama. By Anne 
Ethelyn Markley. Chicago, American Li-
brary Association, 1948, xviii, I23P· $4.75. 
This list of the names of the government 

departments, bureaus and other agencies of 
the territory and state of Alabama is im-
portant in itself and even more noteworthy as 
the first volume of a projected series of 
similar publications to cover the forty-eight 
states and the District of Columbia. Thirty-
seven others are completed or in progress. 
A careful study of this one leads one to wish 
Godspeed to their compilers and to . the 
A.L.A. in its publication of them. For here, 
even at the seemingly high price of $4.75, is 
one answer to the oft-repeated question: 
"How can we cut our cataloging costs?" 

It is generally agreed that official publica-
tions must be cataloged under the names of 
their issuing bodies, assuming that those 
names are known or can be determined by a 
method practicable for libra.ry use. How-
ever, to obtain that knowledge is a time-
consuming and costly process performed over 
and over in the various libraries of the 
country with varying degrees of success, be-

JANUARY, 1949 

cause until now there has been no one good 
source for the information. Each cataloger 
has had to ferret it out of the statutes or 
depend upon inadequate secondary sources. 
Most American libraries have tried to get 
their information about the names of state 
agencies from Library of Congress cards. 
Their success, at least as far as Alabama is 
concerned, is clearly demonstrated by a com-
parison of the Markley list with the Library 
of Congress catalog. The printed list pre-
sents 521 names of state departments, boards, 
bureaus, commissions, etc., both current and 
obsolete, of the state and territory of Ala-
bama, and several times that many references 
from other forms of the names. The Library 
of Congress catalog reveals only I 48 Alabama 
headings plus the corresponding references. 
About twenty-five of these seem to be given 
in a form which is obsolete or which was in-
correct in the first place. Many of the earlier 
headings were established solely on the basis 
of information to be found in the publication 
being cataloged, a procedure which frequently 
proves to be uneconomical in the case of 
official publications, but one that is sometimes 
unavoidable. This means that at the pres-

91