carrier-pigeons and the use of micro-photography, it was again a Lancashire man who had to be thanked for the art of concentrating a page of newspaper to the size of a postage-stamp. Possibly there were two or three contemporaneous inventors, but the first to make micro-photography--after the spectroscope, the most exquisite combination of chemical and optical science yet introduced to the world--public and practical, was the late Mr. J. B. Dancer, of Manchester. [1] _Vide_ Blue Book, 1878, Part I. p. 423. The first return of Bacon for St. Albans was not until 1601. Roger Ascham, whose influence upon education was even profounder than Bacon's, sat for another Lancashire town--Preston--in the Parliament of 1563. Generous and substantial designs for promoting the education of the people, and their enjoyment,--habits also of thrift and of self-culture, are characteristic of Lancashire. Some have had their origin upon the middle social platform; others have sprung from the civilised among the rich.[2] The Co-operative system, with its varied capacities for rendering good service to the provident and careful, had its beginning in Rochdale. The first place to copy Dr. Birkbeck's Mechanics' Institution was Manchester, in which town the first provincial School of Medicine was founded, and which to-day holds the headquarters of the Victoria University. Manchester, again, was the first town in England to take advantage of the Free Libraries Act of 1850, opening on September 2d, 1852, with Liverpool in its immediate wake. The Chetham Free Library (Manchester) had already existed for 200 years, conferring benefits upon the community which it would be difficult to over-estimate. Other Lancashire towns--Darwen, Oldham, Southport, and Preston, for example, have latterly possessed themselves of capital libraries, so that, including the fine old collection at Warrington, the number of books now within reach of Lancashire readers, _pro rata_ for the population, certainly has no parallel out of London. An excellent feature in the management of several of these libraries consists in the effort made to attain completeness in special departments. Rochdale aims at a complete collection of books relating to wool; Wigan desires to possess all that has been written about engineering; the Manchester library contains nearly eight hundred volumes having reference to cotton. In the last-named will also be found the nucleus of a collection which promises to be the finest in the country, of books illustrative of English dialects. The Manchester libraries collectively, or Free and Subscription taken together, are specially rich in botanical and horticultural works--many of them magnificently illustrated and running to several volumes--the sum of the titles amounting to considerably over a thousand. Liverpool, too, is well provided with books of this description, counting among them that splendid