ous owner at Monticello, paying
him for the remainder. More enlightened counsels, however, prevailed, and
the nation became possessed, for about $23,000, of a good basis for a
public library which might become worthy of the country. The collection
thus formed grew by slow accretion until, in 1851, it had accumulated
55,000 volumes. On the 24th of December in that year, a defective flue
in the Capitol set fire to the wood-work with which the whole library was
surrounded, and the result was a conflagration, from which 20,000 volumes
only were saved. Congress at once appropriated, with praiseworthy
liberality, $75,000 for the purchase of new books, and $92,500 for
rebuilding the library room in solid iron; the first instance of the
employment of that safe and permanent material, so capable of the
lightest and most beautiful architectural effects, in the entire interior
structure of any public building. The appropriation of $75,000 was
principally expended in the purchase of standard English literature,
including complete sets of many important periodicals, and a selection of
the more costly works in science and the fine arts. In 1866, two wings,
each as large as the central library, and constructed of the same
fire-proof material, were added to it, and quickly filled by the
accession, the same year and the following, of two large libraries, that
of the Smithsonian Institution, and the historical library of Peter
Force, of Washington. The latter was the largest private library ever
then brought together in the United States, but its chief value consisted
in its possession of a very great proportion of the books relating to the
settlement, history, topography, and politics of America, its 45,000
pamphlets, its files of early newspapers of the Revolution, its early
printed books, and its rich assemblage of maps and manuscripts, many of
the latter being original autographs of the highest historical interest,
including military letters and papers of the period of the American
Revolution. The Smithsonian library, the custody of which was accepted by
Congress as a trust, is rich in scientific works in all the languages of
Europe, and forms an extensive and appropriate supplement to the Library
of Congress, the chief strength of which lies in jurisprudence,
political science, history, and books relating to America. Yet no
department of literature or science has been left unrepresented in its
formation, and the fact has been kept ste