the next day. From this hour until the
closing at nine the librarians are as busy as bees: there is a continual
running from counter to alcove and from gallery to gallery. In some of
the reports of the librarian interesting data are given of the tastes of
readers and the popularity of books. Fiction, as we have seen, leads;
but there is a growing taste for scientific and historical works.
Buckle, Mill, and Macaulay are favorites, and Tyndall, Huxley, and
Lubbock have many readers. The theft of its books is a serious drain on
the library each year, but the destruction of its rare and valuable
works of reference is still more provoking. Common gratitude, it might
seem, would deter persons admitted to the privileges of its alcoves from
injuring its property. What shall we think, then, of the vandals who
during the past year twice cut out the article on political economy in
"Appletons' Cyclopaedia," so mutilated Thomson's "Cyclopaedia of the
Useful Arts" as to render it valueless, and bore off bodily Storer's
"Dictionary of the Solubilities," the second volume of the new edition
of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," Andrews's "Latin Dictionary," and
several other valuable works?

There is a library in the city, the Apprentices', on Sixteenth Street,
whose existence is hardly known even to New-Yorkers, which is
exceedingly interesting to the student as an instance of the good a
trades' union may accomplish when its energies are rightly directed.
Here is a library of about sixty thousand volumes, with a supplementary
reference library of forty thousand seven hundred and fifty works, and a
well-equipped reading-room, free of debt, and free to its patrons, and
all the result of the well-directed efforts of the "Society of Mechanics
and Tradesmen." This society first organized for charitable purposes in
1792, receiving its first charter on the 14th of March of that year. In
January, 1821, its charter was amended, the society being empowered to
support a school for the education of the children of its deceased and
indigent members and for the establishment of an "Apprentices' Library
for the use of the apprentices of mechanics in the City of New York." A
small library had been opened the year before at 12 Chambers Street, and
there the library remained, constantly growing in number of volumes and
patrons, till 1835, when it was removed to the old High-School Building,
at 472 Broadway, which the society about that time purchased. It