the general public. The circulation of photographs of works of art, though important to individual collectors, is rather the affair of public institutions. The similar circulation of books and MSS., the aspect of the question with which we as librarians are particularly concerned, is more directly interesting to private individuals, and on this account has attracted comparatively little notice. I am not sure, however, that it is not the more important of the two, nor that it may not, after all, be the branch most susceptible of profitable development. In the matter of rare books, demand has now almost killed supply. The wish to possess them is more general than ever, but the means of gratifying it become from day to day more restricted by the tendency of such books to drift into public libraries, or into large private collections where they may be locked up indefinitely, and especially by the competition of America. At this juncture, photography, particularly in its form of photo-zincography, steps in, and offers the means of doing for the amateur of ancient and curious literature, for maps and MSS., precisely what the printing-press does for the great body of readers. All we need is that the obstacles which still render this process expensive, except when applied to objects in great demand, should be removed, that the scholar should be enabled to procure a cheap photographic reproduction as easily as the general reader can obtain a cheap book. Such scholars are numerous enough, I feel convinced, to defray the cost of material and of minor assistance, leaving in the worst case nothing for the State to pay but the insignificant salary of the chief photographic officer. Now let us take the case of another class of students, who deserve even more consideration, the collators of MSS. and rare books. Why should the scholar of the nineteenth century be in no better position than the scholar of the sixteenth? Why should he continue to be exposed to hardships which science has met? Think of the waste of human effort, the fret and friction of human temper entailed by the inability to procure accurate facsimiles. Why should the scholar of an age of light get no good from the sun? Think of the long journeys, the long residences, the interminable correspondences of scholars, the mechanical labour if they are their own copyists, the expense and probable inaccuracy if they are not. Do we often see a critical edition of a classic without a lament that the editor has been unable to inspect some MS. at Madrid or Moscow? Did not the Biblical world wait thirty years for a facsimile of the Vatican MS., which a photographer would have produced in a small fraction of the time? And did it not prove an imperfect facsimile after all? Did not the learned Meibomius, albeit a ponderous Dutchman, ill adapted for equitation, ride all the way from Leyden to Bologna, allured by the unhappily misleading announcement, _Habemus Petronium integrum_?