department of finance. His Ways and Means of Payment (1859), is one of the great but neglected books, which must be left to posterity for a just appraisal of their worth. It is based upon an extensive study of the history of the past, and points to a future adjustment of our commercial and banking system, by which all obligations will be discharged, and exchanges effected, by the principle of set-off, which was discovered or originated by the merchants of the great French fairs, and is already applied to the mutual obligations of our banks, as settled in our clearing-houses. In this view, soft money and hard money are alike mere temporary expedients and actual incumbrances in the management of business; money of account furnishing both the true and unvarying standard of value, and the best means of payment.

Mr. Colwell was a man of fortune, and spared no expense to make his library of works on his favorite topic a complete one. Being acquainted with French and Italian, he collected in those languages, as well as in English, every important book, pamphlet or periodical that came within his reach. Sometimes he would be for years on the track of a book, whose value he knew, before he succeeded in adding it to his collection. Some books of this class have become, for various reasons, of extreme scarcity. For instance, as much as a hundred pounds has been offered, by public advertisement, for a single copy of Healy Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints of Ireland (Dublin, 1779), and offered in vain, but it is found in Mr. Colwell's collection. Another work of equal rarity, is a collection of the most important English pamphlets on finance and banking. It is in twelve handsome volumes, and its contents. begin with the times of the first Stuarts, cover the controversies which connect themselves with the origin of the Bank of England and its contemporary rival, the Tory Land Bank, and extend into the present century. It contains but a fragment of the whole literature of the subject, but the pieces it includes are so rare and of such importance, that it would command almost any price. And its permanent value may be inferred from the fact that the queries propounded in connection with the recoinage controversy of 1695, coincide very closely with those issued by the Silver Committee, which has been in session during the recess of Con

5 The weak side of the collection is the slight representation of the German literature of the subject. Such German writers as have been translated into English or French, are present; but the rest, with a few exceptions, such as List and Dühring, are wanting.

gress. In the collection of works on money and banking, which is a very large one, there is a goodly number of the best writers on numismatics, including Eckhel, Mommsen, Ruding, Snelling, Gronovius, De Dominicis and others.

It was the declared intention of Mr. Colwell, not only to give his library to the University, but also to endow a Professorship of Social Science in connection with the gift. But he died before he had carried out either of these intentions, and it was simply the pious regard of his family for his wishes which secured his books to the University, and resisted urgent solicitations to dispose of them in another direction.

When we say that the Colwell collection covers between nine and ten thousand books and pamphlets, our readers will excuse us from any detailed enumeration of its contents. While richest in the special departments in which Mr. Colwell especially interested himself, it covers the whole field of political or national economy, and includes the great bulk of the important literature in the three languages already mentioned, down to the time of his death, in 1870. To describe it, would be to rewrite and greatly enlarge McCulloch's Literature of Political Economy. It has excited the just admiration of every home and foreign economist who has seen it, and there have been many such who visited it during the Centennial Exhibition. An earlier visitor, Mr. Marshall, who lectures on the subject in the Cambridge University, pronounced it unique in its completeness, and said he and his associates would be delighted to possess such a collection on the Cam or the Isis. It has therefore been the more amusing, to see a New England professor escorted through it, and observe him surveying with encyclopedic consciousness and elevated nose, the thousands of arrayed volumes which could add nothing to his wisdom.

But of course, like every library of works on a subject still undergoing developments, it needs continual additions, and should be furnished with a permanent fund for that purpose. The annuals and other periodicals should be kept complete up to date, and new books of importance should be added every year. Thus we have every edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, except the last and best, edited by Prof. Thorold Rodgers; and while Mr. Colwell would have taken a lively interest in the reopening of the discussion of first principles by the Katheder-Socialisten, he died too soon to have even a Pisgah-sight of that now widely-spread

and influential party. And even in its collection of older works, there is room for large additions.

One such addition, a very magnificent one, has been made during the past summer. An English gentleman has presented, through Mr. Henry C. Carey, a collection of two hundred and forty-two volumes of English pamphlets, amounting in all to several thousand publications, and covering the period between 1670 and 1851. Four volumes represent the seventeenth century, and sixty-three the eighteenth. While some of these were already in the Colwell collection, this is by no means true of the bulk of them, and they contribute greatly to the value and the completeness of the library. Their arrangement in chronological order enables the student to get at once at the literature of any of the great financial controversies, such as the Bank of England controversies in 1695 and 1845; the Recoinage controversy of 1695; the South Sea bubble which burst in 1720; the Bullion controversy of 1817, and the Corn Law agitation, 1839-46. This collection may be said to form a library of national economy in itself, so rich is it in the utterances of great authorities such as Ashburton, Tooke and Fullarton. But it receives no less than it imparts of additional value from its association with the Colwell collection, and the generous donor deserves the thanks of all our economists in adding so handsomely to the completeness of the finest library of the subject which they can anywhere find. For in accordance with Mr. Colwell's own wishes, his books have been made as accessible to those who are specially interested in the subject, as is consistent with our University arrangements, and have been freely consulted by many of those who are engaged in writing upon the financial questions of our time.

The Rogers Library of works on Civil and Dynamical Engineering and related topics, is a gift to the University from Prof. Fairman Rogers, as a memorial of his father. It is still in process of formation, but is already one of the finest and most costly collections in the country. Having no technical acquaintance with its subjects, we can only speak in very general terms of the works which compose it. But even the most unskilled observer cannot fail to admire the costly splendor of some of them. For instance, Scott Russell's work on Naval Architecture seems to have been constructed on a scale proportional to his "Great Eastern;" and its next neighbor The Ganges Canal is another elephantine folio

of elaborate maps, plans and prospects, with three bulky volumes of descriptive letter-press. The price of one such work is counted by hundreds of dollars. This library is very rich in periodicals, and besides the published catalogue of its books, there is preparing a written catalogue of all the important articles which these contain. Of greatest interest to general readers are the works on architecture, which cluster around Ferguson's great History, itself one of the most wonderful among the wonderful books of this century.

By the conjoint action of the Board of Trustees and the Society of the Alumni, the classical library of the late Prof. Geo. Allen was added to the literary treasures of the University, in the summer of 1873. The latter raised by subscription some three thousand two hundred dollars, to which the former added two thousand. But this sum does not represent even the first cost of the books thus acquired, to say nothing of any payment for the skill exercised in their selection, a matter in which Dr. Allen was an expert of the first order. We may, therefore, regard the former owner of the books as one of the chief donors of the collection to the University.

The main thing in this Allen Library is, of course, the collection of classic Greek authors, in the best and most desirable editions, but chiefly the modern editions; together with a large apparatus of introductory works on Ancient History, and Antiquities, Grammars, Lexicons, and the like. The central stem of the collection, as we may say, is the magnificent Paris Bibliotheca of Didot, in sixty-six volumes of lexicon octavo size, in which the Greek texts are accompanied by Latin translations, and a more or less elaborate annotation. The names of the editors show that "the Aldus Manutius of France" was obliged to call Teutonic scholarship to his aid in its preparation, as also in enlarging to its present size his magnificent edition of the Greek Thesaurus of Henry Estienne. The latter was a Huguenot classical scholar and publisher, such as France cannot now exhibit, although he was but one among the Scaligers, the Casaubons, and the Castellios in the Reformed camp, and not even primus inter pares. Beside the nine folios of the Didot reprint stand the four of his own edition, themselves a monument of the patience and the thoroughness of the scholarship of the Renaissance. Every word in Greek literature is here, and not only is it defined, but all the important passages, and in some instances all the passages in which it occurs

are quoted. Both the Bibliotheca and the Thesaurus, we may add, are beautifully bound, and like all Dr. Allen's books, are in the best condition. Parallel with the Bibliotheca runs that Tauchnitz edition of the classics in duodecimo, whose cheapness and handiness have made classical literature accessible to the slender purse of the scholar. Around the two series are grouped all the great modern editions of the Greek authors, especially of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, the Greek dramatists, and Theocritus; especially, also, all the critical labors of his favorites, Bentley, Schweighauser, Hermann, Dindorf, Beckker, Stallbaum, and Paley. What we have said of his tastes and preferences last July, may excuse the absence of a further account here. One point, however, seems worth adding: he looked upon Greek literature with the eye of a scholar and a philologist, rather than with that of a historian. His tastes and his collections were, therefore, limited to classic authors, and he used to express his astonishment at the preference shown by the older generation of teachers, like his predecessor Dr. Wylie, for Longinus, Cebes, Epictetus, Theophrastus and Marcus Aurelius, writers of a later age and inferior purity of style and vocabulary. For this reason his collections terminate somewhat abruptly at Plutarch and Lucian, only the romancers, the scholiasts and the lexicographers of a later date, being properly represented. It was, therefore, a most desirable addition. to his library, when a part of the fund voted by the Trustees for the purchase of historical works (vide infra), was expended in procuring the Bonn edition of the Byzantine historians, edited by Barthold Niebuhr and his colleagues, these latter including some of the most eminent of German scholars. Another addition which is still much needed, is the great critical editions of the Greek Scriptures, by Tischendorf, Stier and Theile, Lachmann and Buttman, Meyer, Tregelles, Bloomfield, Ellicott, Webster and Wilkinson, Alford, and Wordsworth, besides the reprints of the great Codices, and the special apparatus for the study of New Testament Greek. A superb copy of Plutarch's Moralia, in Wyttembach's (Oxford) quarto edition, the gift of the class of 1865, commemorates what was in his opinion the first in time of the notable graduating classes of the recent era. It takes rank among the finest specimens of Greek printing in the world.

Supplementary to Dr. Allen's Greek library is his collection of works on military science, which he used in his very thorough