Straitened means of maintenance have, at all times, had far more to do with any inadequate provision for public usefulness of which (in days long past) there may have been well-grounded cause of complaint, than had neglect or oversight on the part of any officer. The officers, too, were, for a very long period after the establishment of the Museum, engaged, and remunerated, only for an attendance, in rotation, for two hours daily, on alternate days. A largely increased provision by Parliament was the essential condition of any large increase in the accessibility of the institution. As early as in 1776 the necessary expenditure in salaries and wages alone (at a very low scale of payment), exceeded the annual income (£900) accruing from the original endowment fund. After Parliament had made an additional provision—first introduced in a clause of what was then called a ‘hotch-potch Act’—averaging £1000 yearly, the total annual income was still but £2448, including the yearly three hundred pounds accruing from the ‘EDWARDS Fund,’ and the £248, paid, under the grant of GEORGE THE SECOND, as the net yearly salary of the ‘King’s Librarian.’ For a considerable period, the sums expended in purchases—for all the departments collectively—had not amounted, in any one year, to one hundred pounds. [Sidenote: THE CAREER OF DR. MATTHEW MATY.] On the decease of the first Principal Librarian, Dr. Gowin KNIGHT, in 1772, Dr. Matthew MATY was appointed to that office. He was born at, or in the neighbourhood of Utrecht, in 1718, and was educated in the University of Leyden, where he took his degrees in 1740, the subject of his inaugural dissertation, for that of M.A. and Doctor of Philosophy, being ‘custom,’ and its wide results and influence social and political. His essay was published (under the title _Dissertatio philosophica inauguralis de Usu_,) in 1740. For the degree of Doctor in Medicine, he treated of the effects of habit and custom upon the human frame (_De Consuetudinis efficacia in corpus humanum_). This medical dissertation was also published at Leyden, in the usual form, in the same year. Both essays showed much ability, along with many faults and crudities. Some of these became matters of conversation and correspondence between the author and his friends. The subject was less hacknied than that of the majority of academical essays, and MATY was induced to reconsider it. He republished the result of his thoughts, in a greatly improved form, in the following year at Utrecht, and, to gain a wider audience, wrote in French. The _Essai sur l’Usage_ attracted much attention, and served to pave the way for the establishment by its author, eight years afterwards, of the periodical entitled, _Journal Britannique_, as editor of which he is now best remembered. He came to England in 1741, practised as a physician, attained considerable reputation, and distinguished himself more especially by following in the path of Sir Hans SLOANE, and