Another of the potent enemies of books is fire. I refer, not to over-heating the rooms they occupy, but to the risk they continually run, in most libraries, of total destruction. The chronicle of burned libraries would make a long and melancholy record, on which there is no space here to enter. Irreparable losses of manuscripts and early printed books, and precious volumes printed in small editions, have arisen from men's neglect of building our book-repositories fire-proof. In all libraries not provided with iron or steel shelves, there is perpetual danger. Books do not burn easily, unless surrounded with combustibles, but these are furnished in nearly all libraries, by surrounding the books on three sides with wooden shelves, which need only to be ignited at any point to put the whole collection in a blaze. Then follows the usual abortive endeavor to save the library by the aid of fire engines, which flood the building, until the water spoils nearly all which the fire does not consume. The incalculable losses which the cause of learning has sustained from the burning of public, university and ecclesiastical libraries are far greater than the cost which the provision of fire-proof repositories would have entailed. Of late years, there has been a partial reform in library construction. Some have been built fire-proof throughout, with only stone, brick, concrete and iron material, even to the floors and window casings. Many more have had iron shelves and iron stacks to hold the shelves constructed, and there are now several competing manufacturers of these invaluable safeguards to books. The first library interior constructed wholly of iron was that of the Library of Congress at Washington, which had been twice consumed, first when the Capitol was burned by the British army in 1814, and again in 1851, through a defective flue, when only 20,000 volumes were saved from the flames, out of a total of 55,000. The example of iron construction has been slowly followed, until now the large cities have most of their newly-constructed libraries approximately fire-proof, although many are exposed to fire in parts, owing to a niggardly and false economy. The lesson that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and that every neglect of security brings sooner or later irreparable loss, is very slowly learned. Whole hecatombs of books have been sacrificed to the spirit of commercial greed, blind or short-sighted enough not to see that secure protection to public property, though costlier at first, is far cheaper in the end. You may speak of insurance against library losses by fire, but what insurance could restore the rare and costly Shakespearean treasures of the Birmingham Free Library, or the unique and priceless manuscripts that went up in flames in the city library of Strasburg, in 1870, or the many precious and irreplaceable manuscript archives of so many of our States, burned in the conflagration of their capitols?