ansion); on Bewick, by
Hugo; on Bartolozzi, by Tuer; on Tokens, by Williamson and by Atkins;
on Coins and Medals, by a numerous body of gentlemen specified in a
section of the writer's _Coin Collector_, 1896. In the English and
American series are the well-known volumes by Henry Stevens and by
Sabin, and the sumptuous catalogue of the early Laws and Statutes by
Mr. Charlemagne Tower. In the Chetham Society's series, Mr. Jones,
late Chetham's Librarian, printed an elaborate list of all the old
English books and tracts relating to Popery.

There are many ways in which compilers of works of reference are in
danger of perpetuating mistakes as to books, where they rely on
secondary authorities. No account of an old book is, in the first
place, entitled to credence unless it has been drawn up by the
describer with the book itself before him; and when it is considered
that not one individual in ten thousand can even then be trusted to
copy what is under his eyes, and that there are, and always have been,
those who have thought fit to exercise their ingenuity by falsifying
dates and other particulars, there cannot be much room for surprise
that our bibliographies, and those of every other people, are partly
made up of material which never existed. Errors are heirlooms, of
which it is hard to get rid.

The extent to which rare books are multiplied, as regards varieties of
impression, by misdescriptions in catalogues, is remarkable and
serious, and the bibliographer is not unfrequently confronted with
statements of his ignorance of copies in sales of which he has not
thought it worth while to indicate the true facts. But it is our
individual experience that it is impossible to be too minute in
pointing out snares for the unwary, and indeed for all who work at
second-hand.

The Club or Society for the communication to members, and through them
to the public generally, of literary and archaeological material
previously existing only in MS. or in unique printed copies, was at
the outset very restricted in its zone and its scope; but, in spite of
the circumscribed interest felt by general readers in the more
abstruse or obscure provinces of research, the movement, at first
confined to scholars and patrons of literature, at length became
universal in its range and distribution. There is no country
pretending to culture without several of these institutions. In Great
Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland