tions.

The popularity of the British Museum may be shown by quoting the last
return of the number of visitors, &c., presented to the House of
Commons. This return proves that, while the public interest in the
collection is on the increase, that the guardians of the different
departments look out eagerly for new curiosities:--"The number of
readers--or rather of visits made by readers, in 1850, was
78,533:--or, an average of some 268 per diem:--the Reading Rooms
having been kept open 291 days. The number of books returned to the
shelves of the General Library from the Reading Rooms was 119,093; to
those of the Royal Library, 11,252; to those of the Grenville Library,
387: to the closets in which the books are kept from day to day for
the use of the readers, 110,950:--making a total of 241,682, or 830
per diem. The number of volumes added to the Library amounts to 16,208
(including music, maps, and newspapers); of which 837 were presented,
11,793 purchased, and 3575 received by copyright. The Keeper of the
MSS. has been busy cleaning, cataloguing, and stamping. Eleven of the
valuable Cottonian MSS. on vellum (including the Chronicle of Roger de
Wendover, supposed to have been utterly destroyed), and two Old Royal
as well as five Cottonian on paper, all injured in the fire of 1731,
have been carefully repaired, inlaid, and rebound. The purchases
include a Psalter of the tenth century, formerly belonging to the
monastery of Stavelot, in the diocese of Liege,--'a remarkably fine
Greek MS.' containing the works ascribed to Dionysius the
Areopagite,--and the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzum, 'with scholia
written in the year 6480 (A.D. 972);'--together with nineteen
additional volumes of a series of transcripts from the Archives at the
Hague, of documents relating to English history, extending from 1588
to 1614 and from 1689 to 1702.--In the 'Department of Natural
History,' we find that great progress has been made in the arrangement
of the contents of Room No. VI.,--its wall cases having been entirely
filled with the gigantic Osseous Remains of Edentata and Pachydermata,
and that the Central Room of the Northern Zoological Gallery has been
devoted to a collection of the Beasts, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, Shells,
Sea Eggs, Starfish, and Corals found in the British Islands. The
purchases include 'a silver decadrachm of Alexander the Great,' from
the collection of Colonel Rawlinson,--the first ever discovered,--'and
two very rare