, where patients are arranged according
to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has
more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux
of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult.

Chief Justice Story used to assert that no American could test the
accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an assertion
would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are
still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our
approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the
secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous
among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main
authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in
vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the
public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San
Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet
penetrated west of our Atlantic slope.

But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to
know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the
Pacific shore, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the
Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array
of bibliothecal catalogues.

Why will not our Centenary Women's Club buy our Free Library a Zosimus?

Free libraries, especially those maintained by public taxation, were
scarcely known before the last half of the nineteenth century. If in an
antiquarian mood, I could indeed bring forth curious details concerning
half a hundred in continental Europe, some of them running back several
centuries, but I forbear. The earliest British library law, similar to
ours in Wisconsin, dates from 1850. The earliest in Massachusetts--and I
suppose in America--was approved May 24, 1851. The first library opened
in consequence of this law was in New Bedford, March 3, 1853. The
grandest triumph under the Massachusetts law is in Boston. The free
library there stands to-day surpassed in volumes by only three or four
American libraries--say the Astor, Congress, and Harvard--while in
arrangement, architecture, and equipment it is pronounced by the most
enlightened foreigners unsurpassed by any library in the world.

Our legislature in 1872 empowered the mayors and councils in towns and
cities to lay an annual tax of one mill on a d