The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth. To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all, leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes--an accumulation not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses, that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry are eagerly sought and used by our people. [Illustration: THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.]