high, so that the class of real purchasers
has been extirpated, leaving behind as buyers
only a few individuals who might almost be
counted on the fingers, while the effective
circulation depends upon middle-men through the
engine of circulating libraries. These are not
so much owners as distributers of books, and
they mitigate the difficulty of dearness by
subdividing the cost, and then selling such copies
as are still in decent condition at a large
reduction. It is this state of things, due, in my
opinion, principally to the present form of the
law of copyright, which perhaps may have
helped to make way for the satirical (and
sometimes untrue) remark that in times of distress
or pressure men make their first economies on
their charities, and their second on their books.

The annual arrivals at the Bodleian Library
are, I believe, some twenty thousand; at the
British Museum, forty thousand, sheets of all
kinds included. Supposing three-fourths of
these to be volumes, of one size or another,
and to require on the average an inch of
shelf space, the result will be that in every
two years nearly a mile of new shelving will
be required to meet the wants of a single
library. But, whatever may be the present
rate of growth, it is small in comparison with
what it is likely to become. The key of the