During the seventeenth century the Bodleian became, very naturally, the depository of other things than books. It was an eminently safe place for the deposit of both artistic and numismatical collections, as well as for curiosities of every kind. The Ashmolean Museum, opened in 1683, was the first public museum in Great Britain, and was full of similar objects intended to promote the study of natural history, anthropology (as we now call it) and science; and from about 1750 it diverted to itself the streams of donation in those kinds. But throughout the eighteenth century pictures and coins flowed into the Bodleian, where the ample Picture Gallery, provided by the forethought of the Founder, was able to house them all. The coin collection began with a large gift from Archbishop Laud in 1636, and Freke, Rawlinson, Brown Willis, Ingram and many others augmented it, till it has now reached about 60,000 pieces, and is ready for transference to its proper place, the New Ashmolean. The pictures also which were primarily of artistic value have been within the last thirty years for the most part transferred to the New Ashmolean, and the ceremonial ones (Chancellors in their robes, royal personages and the like) are in the New Examination Schools, leaving still a large number which are of historical, literary or Bodleian interest to adorn the Picture Gallery. All are described fully in Mrs. Poole’s _Catalogue of Portraits_ in Oxford, vol. i (1912). CHAPTER VI METHODS AND MATERIALS OF MODERN STUDY Man lives _in_ the present, _for_ the future, but emphatically _by_ the past. He cannot possibly understand what he sees (whether in politics, theology, literature or science), without realizing how it came to be. If he attempts to avoid this necessary study of the past, or affects to despise it, he is beaten in the race of life by those who are wiser than himself. Every characteristic of a living person or nation, the stock of ideas and ideals by which they live, their very habits and daily life, all have roots deep in the past. If this truth is grasped—and it is not less true because it can be clearly and shortly stated—libraries are seen at once to be a necessary adjunct to all education and all civilization. Carlyle saw this when he wrote with characteristic exaggeration that the Modern University is a Library of Books. But, as is pointed out at p. 10 above, there are libraries and libraries. However valuable elementary and circulating and private libraries may be (and they are the necessary lower rungs of the ladder of progress), it is for the great Libraries of Deposit that the educated student reserves his time, his energies and his admiration. The certainty of finding all, or nearly all, the authorities on his subject, and of finding them at hand, is his delight. If he further discovers a large store of manuscripts from which new information may be drawn, or old texts improved, his pleasure amounts to enthusiasm.