adjoining ground is preoccupied, and must be acquired at a great additional expense. Fifty thousand pounds would, I believe, be a very moderate estimate for such accommodation, if obtained by building, as the Museum gets from the sliding-press for £15,000, supposing even that the ground were free to build upon. In our case, however, this ground must have been purchased. We may well imagine the Trojan siege we should have had to lay to the Treasury, to obtain the money; the delays of building when this was eventually forthcoming; and the fearful inconvenience which would have existed meanwhile. Now we simply put down a sum in the annual estimates for as many sliding-presses as are likely to be required during the ensuing financial year, introduce them wherever they seem to be necessary, and hope to go on thus for an indefinite number of years. Any new apartment, complete in itself, must involve waste, for some parts of it must necessarily fill up faster than others; but in the sliding-press is a beautiful elasticity; it can be introduced wherever it is seen to be wanted, and nowhere else. Finally, and for the Museum this is most important, the additional space gained is in the close vicinity of the Reading Room. A new building must have been at a distance, involving either great inconvenience in the supply of books to readers, or an additional Reading Room, catalogue, reference library, and staff. I think enough has been said to convince librarians of the expediency of taking the sliding-press, or some analogous contrivance, into account, in plans for the enlargement of old libraries, or the construction of new ones. Some libraries will not require it, either because they are on too small a scale; or because, like branch libraries in great towns, they admit of being kept within limits; or because, like Archbishop Marsh's Library at Dublin, they are restricted to special collections. But all experience shows that it is impossible to provide for the wants of a great and growing library on too generous a scale, or to exhibit too much forethought in preparing for distant, it may be, but ultimately inevitable contingencies. York Cathedral Library might have seemed safe, but see the burden which Mr. Hailstone's recent benefaction has laid upon it. To the librarian it may be said of Space what the poet said of Love:— "Whoe'er thou art, thy master see, He was, or is, or is to be." I should add that the cost of a sliding-press, or of a door-press, might probably be much less to a provincial library than to the Museum, where the shelves are constructed in the most elaborate manner for special security against fire.