To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True, it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was a time--there still is a time in many parts of the country--when even a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply of catalogues and bibliographies. Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library? In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult, local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of information in the library. No department of the library economy should work in isolation.