It is much easier to decry gas than to find a remedy.
Sun lights require especial arrangements, and are very expensive
on account of the quantity of gas consumed. The library
illumination of the future promises to be the electric light.
If only steady and moderate in price, it would be a great
boon to public libraries, and perhaps the day is not far
distant when it will replace gas, even in private houses.
That will, indeed, be a day of jubilee to the literary labourer.
The injury done by gas is so generally acknowledged by the heads
of our national libraries, that it is strictly excluded from
their domains, although the danger from explosion and fire,
even if the results of combustion were innocuous, would be
sufficient cause for its banishment.

The electric light has been in use for some months in the Reading Room
of the British Museum, and is a great boon to the readers.
The light is not quite equally diffused, and you must choose particular
positions if you want to work happily. There is a great objection, too,
in the humming fizz which accompanies the action of the electricity.
There is a still greater objection when small pieces of hot
chalk fall on your bald head, an annoyance which has been lately
(1880) entirely removed by placing a receptacle beneath each burner.
You require also to become accustomed to the whiteness of the light
before you can altogether forget it. But with all its faults it
confers a great boon upon students, enabling them not only to work
three hours longer in the winter-time, but restoring to them
the use of foggy and dark days, in which formerly no book-work
at all could be pursued.[1]