The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases, many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories, year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies and other registers--all these find their appropriate home in this department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it can be afforded. In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts. In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin. These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections respectable in the size and quality of their contents. [Illustration: _Photo by Donald Macbeth._ READING ROOM IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]