Any one beginning microscopic work will find all, and more than all, his wants satisfied for a long time to come by a five guinea instrument, and he is not unlikely to damage even that. Suppose that, instead of such an instrument, you gave him at once a two hundred pound microscope by Smith and Beck, or Ross, what would happen? He would be utterly bewildered by the complexity of it, utterly unable to use it as it should be used, and he would most certainly before long so damage it as to render it useless to all who could make a proper use of it. Between a first-rate microscope by Ross and a three or five guinea instrument the difference is much less than is the difference between the Bodleian and a library fit for undergraduates, or generally for the unlearned. By introducing undergraduates, schoolboys, and girls into such a library as the Bodleian, you in fact degrade the library to base uses, and render it _pro tanto_ inconvenient, to use a very mild term, to all who are fit to benefit by it, and who were intended by the founder to have the advantage of it. 'What my experience has taught me,' says a most learned bibliographer (1. R. 121)[15], 'is, that it ought never to be attempted to use, as a popular library, the large libraries intended in the first instance for a superior class of readers;' and he adds further, that 'on every occasion, when it has been tried, the greatest part of the riches accumulated in the old library have been rendered useless.' [15] Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 23 July, 1849, quoted by pages as 1. R. A second volume ordered to be printed 1 August, 1850, is quoted also by pages as 2. R. These Blue books contain an immense amount of information on all the libraries of Europe, and although the information is some forty years old, it is still indispensable to all who wish to acquaint themselves with the subject. The evidence also given is of the most varied kind, and very instructive. If it is in any sense useful to lend books out of the library, it is far more useful, all things considered, not to lend them.