After having given the reader some notion of the collection of printed works, I should like now to invite him to accompany me through the Manuscript Department of the Museum. But I am afraid that I shall make a bad guide here; for the Museum is still without a descriptive catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts, which is the only means of enabling the student to obtain a general view of the number and nature of these works. The manuscript catalogue of Dukes goes only as far as 1856. It was, as we shall soon see, just after this time that the Museum made its largest and, to a certain degree also, its most valuable acquisitions in Hebrew manuscripts. The following remarks must, therefore, not be taken as the result of a systematic study of this collection, which would be quite impossible without the aid of a catalogue. They rest partly on the descriptions given of a certain number of manuscripts in the catalogue by Dukes, but for the greater part on occasional glances at this or that MS. As to the history of the collection, it has grown out of small beginnings just as that of printed books. The collection of Dr. Sloane, which laid the foundation of the Museum Library, contained only nine Hebrew MSS. Later acquisitions, as the Harleian collection, the Cottonian collection, the Royal collection, and many other smaller collections marked as Additional up to 1854, increased the number of the Hebrew manuscripts to 232. Of much more importance was the Almanzi collection, bought by the trustees of the Museum in 1865, and consisting of 335 MSS. Of succeeding acquisitions I shall mention here only the Yemen MSS., which were brought to this country by the famous Shapira. The number of Hebrew MSS. at the present day is said to exceed one thousand. But we must not forget that many MSS. contain more than one work; in some cases even three or four, so that the number of Hebrew works is far greater still. I shall now speak of the nature and importance of these MSS. As to their contents they may be easily grouped under the following headings: Biblical MSS., Commentaries (to the Bible) and Super‐Commentaries, parts of the Talmud and their Commentaries, Theology, Philosophy and Ethics, Massorah, Grammar and Lexicography, Cabbalah, Poetry, Mathematics, Astronomy, Astrology and Magic, Historical and Polemical Literature, etc. All these branches of theological and secular learning and even of human folly are fairly represented in the collection of Hebrew MSS. in the Museum, though often only by a part or a fragment of a work.