This educational failure and the secular nature of the education that they sought made them unsatisfactory in the eyes of the Christian Socialist group, who in 1854 founded what they considered a better type of mechanics’ institute in the Working Men’s College. But the Mechanics’ Institutes, though most of them were transformed or absorbed into a different kind of institute, did not cease to exist; a number have survived to this day or the eve of it, and some have carried on work of priceless importance, side by side with the public libraries, which were now about to arise. To say that there were no free libraries for the people before 1850 is practically though not literally true. Those interested in the history of libraries can point to many older examples, certain of which were open to all comers. Long before the nineteenth century idealists schemed to provide every reader in the nation with access to books, as for instance the Scottish grammarian James Kirkwood, author of a pamphlet in 1699 entitled “An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of Bibliothecks in every Paroch throughout the Kingdom,” and of a project for erecting a library in every presbytery or at least county in the Highlands. The project was approved by the General Assembly, but had no great results. In the Middle Ages, many of the monastic libraries were nominally open to the public; but as a reading public hardly existed the fact does not amount to much. Nor is it of more than antiquarian interest whether London had a public library as far back as the early fifteenth century, the joint foundation of Sir Richard Whittington and William Bury. Readers did exist at the beginning of the next century, wherefore the appearance of a city library here and there is of more significance. Norwich claims to have the oldest of these that has never perished, founded in 1608 and preserved in the public library there to-day. The library founded at Bristol in 1615 came under the operation of the Public Library Acts when these were adopted by that city in 1876. The venerable Chetham Library at Manchester dates from 1654, when the books were placed in the quarters they still occupy in the college built in 1421. The number of volumes is vastly greater, but the Chetham Library has not changed in character or in the atmosphere of a still remoter antiquity that it had at its beginning. Dr. Bray and his associates established 78 parochial libraries and 35 lending libraries between 1704 and 1807, which were meant for the use of poor clergymen. He also secured an Act “For the Better Preservation of Parochial Libraries;” but this in time became a dead letter. The British Museum was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened to the public in 1759, and gradually absorbed various royal and other collections, forming a great storehouse of books for scholars and other literary workers. London, nearly a century later, when the public library