er, till it cracks or crumbles under the
heat. The upper shelves or galleries of any library are most seriously
affected by over-heating, because the natural law causes the heat to rise
toward the ceiling. If you put your hand on some books occupying the
highest places in some library rooms, in mid-winter, when the fires are
kept at their maximum, the heat of the volume will almost burn your
fingers. If these books were sentient beings, and could speak, would they
not say--"our sufferings are intolerable?"

The remedy is of course a preventive one; never to suffer the library to
become over-heated, and to have proper ventilation on every floor,
communicating with the air outside. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit is a safe
and proper maximum temperature for books and librarian.

The mischief arising from gas exhalations is another serious source of
danger to books. In many well-lighted libraries, the heat itself from the
numerous gas-burners is sufficient to injure them, and there is besides a
sulphuric acid escaping from the coal-gas fluid, in combustion, which is
most deleterious to bindings. The only remedy appears to be, where
libraries are open evenings, to furnish them with electric lights. This
improved mode of illumination is now so perfected, and so widely
diffused, that it may be reckoned a positive boon to public libraries, in
saving their books from one of their worst and most destructive enemies.

Another of the potent enemies of books is fire. I refer, not to
over-heating the rooms they occupy, but to the risk they continually run,
in most libraries, of total destruction. The chronicle of burned
libraries would make a long and melancholy record, on which there is no
space here to enter. Irreparable losses of manuscripts and early printed
books, and precious volumes printed in small editions, have arisen from
men's neglect of building our book-repositories fire-proof. In all
libraries not provided with iron or steel shelves, there is perpetual
danger. Books do not burn easily, unless surrounded with combustibles,
but these are furnished in nearly all libraries, by surrounding the books
on three sides with wooden shelves, which need only to be ignited at any
point to put the whole collection in a blaze. Then follows the usual
abortive endeavor to save the library by the aid of fire engines, which
flood the building, until the water spoils nearly all which the fire does
not consume. The incalculable losses which th