2. Next to the Bibliotheque nationale of France, comes the Library of the British Museum, with 2,000,000 volumes, very rich both in manuscripts and in printed books in all languages. A liberal Parliamentary grant of $60,000 a year for purchase of books and manuscripts keeps this great collection well up to date as to all important new works, besides enabling it constantly to fill up deficiencies in the literature of the past. Following this, among the great libraries having over half a million books, come in numerical order Volumes. 3. Russian Imperial Library, St. Petersburg, 1,200,000 4. Royal Library of Prussia, Berlin, 1,000,000 5. Royal Library of Bavaria, Munich, 980,000 6. Library of Congress, Washington City, 840,000 7. Boston Public Library, 734,000 8. University Library, Strasburg, Germany, 700,000 9. Imperial Public Library, Vienna, 575,000 10. Bodleian Library, Oxford 530,000 It is a notable fact that among the richest monuments of learning that have been gathered by mankind, the University libraries hold a very high rank. Reckoned in number of volumes, there are many of them which far outrank the government libraries, except in six instances. Out of 174 libraries, all exceeding 100,000 volumes, as reported in the annual _Minerva_, in October, 1898, no less than 72 are the libraries of universities. Strasburg heads the list, with a noble collection of 700,000 volumes; then Oxford university, whose Bodleian library numbers 530,000; Leipzig university, 504,000; Cambridge university, England, Goettingen university, and Harvard university, 500,000 each; the university of Vienna, 475,000; the universities of Heidelberg and of Munich, 400,000 each; Ghent and Wuerzburg universities, 350,000 each; Christiania, Norway, university, and Tuebingen, each 340,000; University of Chicago, 330,000; Copenhagen university, 305,000; Breslau, Cracow, Rostock and Upsala, 300,000 each; Yale university, New Haven, 280,000; St. Petersburg, 257,000; Bologna, 255,000; Freiburg and Bonn universities, 250,000 each; Prague, 245,000; Trinity, Dublin, 232,000; Koenigsberg, 231,000; Kiel, 229,000; Naples, 224,000; and Buda-Pest, 210,000. I need not detain you by enumerating those that fall below 200,000 volumes, but will say that the whole number of volumes in the 72 university libraries embraced in my table is more than fifteen millions, which would be much enlarged if smaller libraries were included. A noble exhibit is this, which the institutions of the highest education hold up before us. * * * * *