Naturally enough, therefore, the Library has grown in the last quarter of a century to be by far the largest in the country. In 1896 it contained, roughly estimated, 755,000 volumes of books, 250,000 pamphlets, 500,000 separate pieces of music, 25,000 maps, and 256,000 engravings, photographs, lithographs, etchings, photogravures, and pictorial illustrations in general. =The Old Quarters in the Capitol.=--For many years the Library had been kept in the west front of the Capitol. Here there was provision for perhaps 350,000 volumes. With the great increase, the old quarters had long been utterly inadequate. The crypts in the basement of the Capitol afforded room for storage, but the hundreds of thousands of books, pieces of music, and engravings thus stored were for the most part entirely inaccessible to the student--a serious loss to the usefulness of the Library, in spite of the fact that, so far as the books were concerned, only duplicates and such volumes as were seldom called for were thus laid away. The copyright business could be kept up to date only by the greatest effort. The rooms regularly devoted to the Library were so small, and so over-crowded with books, that there was almost no opportunity for quiet study, while the ordinary official routine was carried on with the greatest difficulty and inconvenience. That the Library should be able to keep its doors open at all, much more that it should continue promptly to furnish books to applicants, was a sufficient cause for wonder.