Print and the sliding-press are now, along with the electric light, undisputed possessions of the Museum; but telegraphy and photography, the two other applications of scientific ingenuity recommended in this volume, have not yet been enlisted in her service. When the printing telegraph obtains a footing, ample occupation will be found for it. Its most useful as well as most striking application, however, will probably always be the one principally dwelt upon here, the enabling every demand for a book made in the reading-room to be simultaneously registered in the Library, thus abolishing at a stroke the vexatious delays that now intervene between the writing of a ticket and its delivery in the proper quarter. The advantage alike to the public and to the staff is so obvious that the only question ought to be as to the applicability of electrical power to the transmission of legible messages under the special circumstances, which an intelligent course of experiments would speedily determine. If telegraphy has been neglected, the same cannot be said of photography. The most perfect unanimity exists within and outside the Museum with respect to the benefit which the adoption of photography as a department of the regular work of the institution would confer alike upon it and upon the public. Nevertheless, not a single step has been taken since the writer brought the subject forward in 1884, preceded as this had been by the successful introduction of photography at the Bodleian Library in connection with the Oxford University Press. Government seems unable to perceive the public benefit to be derived from the cheap reproduction and unlimited multiplication with infallible accuracy of historical documents and current official papers; and although the Museum has of late successfully resorted to photography for its own publications, this has necessarily involved the employment of a professional photographer, whose charges are an insuperable impediment to any considerable extension of the system. It cannot be too emphatically reiterated that the question is entirely one of expense. So long as the photographer is a private tradesman he must of necessity be paid by his customers, and for any extensive undertaking must inevitably charge prices embarrassing to public institutions and prohibitive to private individuals. Make him a public salaried officer, and by far the larger part of the cost is eliminated at a stroke. What may be done is shown by the recent exploit of the Newbery Library at Chicago, referred to in a note at page 86, which has turned the bewildering multitude of the "accession" parts of the British Museum Catalogue into a single alphabetical series by simply photographing the titles singly, and then combining the copies in a catalogue. It is quite possible that the enterprise may prove financially unremunerative, but this would not be the case if it had been executed as a portion of the work of a national