procure any good account of the early Peruvian books, we will describe the first three from the copies in the British Museum. The title-page of the first is wanting in the Museum copy; it reads, however, " Doctrina Cristiana en Quichua y Aymara." The colophon has "Impresso en la Ciudad de los Reyes [Lima] por Antonio Ricardo, primero Impressor en estos Reynos del Piru. Año de M.D.LXXXIII." The second is a "Confessionario para los curas de Indios con la instrucion contra sus ritos, etc. Compuesto y traduzido en las lenguas Quichua y Aymara. Por autoridad del Concilio Provincial de Lima, del año de 1583. Impresso en la Ciudad de los Reyes por Antonio Ricardo primero Impressor en estos reynos del Piru. Año de MDLXXXV." The third is "Tercero Cathecismo y exposicion de la Doctrina Christiana, por Sermones" with the same imprint as the last. By an extraordinary piece of good fortune, these books had been bound together in one cover, and, being regarded as a single book, came simultaneously in 1891 into the possession of the British Museum, which thus acquired at a stroke the first three typographical productions of South America, though it wants, and probably always will want, the corresponding three of the northern half of the continent.

Mr. Winship's remark that he has as yet been unable to secure any good account of the works issued from the press of Ricardo, or from those of his successors on the southern continent, seems to indicate that he is unacquainted with Señor J. T. Medina's "La Imprenta en Lima," Santiago, 1890, which contains the titles, frequently, no doubt, brief, unaccompanied by the printer's name, and descriptive of books not seen by Señor Medina himself, of 1,155 books printed at Lima between 1584 and 1810. Mr. Winship's unacquaintance with Señor Medina's labours is no doubt owing to no more than one hundred copies of this miniature bibliography having been printed. The author, who is inferior to no living bibliographer in industry and accuracy, needs nothing but encouragement to

produce bibliographies of Peruvian, Chilian, and indeed all Spanish-American literatures, upon the colossal scale of the Argentine and Paraguayan bibliography he has already brought out under the auspices of the Museo de La Plata, an institution unique in the South American world.

We may conclude the subject of early Spanish-American literature in the Museum by a brief notice of two particularly interesting classes of books. One is those representing the primitive typography of Paraguay while Paraguay was under the sway of the Jesuits; and bibliographically remarkable, not only on account of their extreme rarity and as the earliest printed monuments of the vernacular languages, but from the extreme rudeness of the typographical execution. So blurred is the impression that they have been confidently stated to have been printed from wooden types; documentary evidence, however, as well as the judgment of experts in type-founding, determines them to have been made of tin: the importation of types properly alloyed having no doubt been obstructed by the jealousy of the Spanish government. In his Paraguayan bibliography Señor Medina enumerates seven of these remarkable productions, four of which are in the Museum :

Nieremberg. "On the difference between things temporal and eternal,” translated into Guarani by Father Jose Serrano. En las Do&trinas, 1705.

Liturgical Manual in Guarani. Loreto, 1721.

* Ruiz de Montoya. Vocabulario de la Lengua Guarani. Santa Maria la Mayor, 1722.

* Ruiz de Montoya. Arte de la lengua Guarani. Santa Maria la Mayor, 1724.

*Yapuguai. Catecismo [in Guarani]. Santa Maria la Mayor, 1724.

Yapuguai. Sermones y Exemplos [in Guarani]. San Francisco Xavier, 1727.

* Antequera y Castro. Letter to the Bishop of Paraguay. San Francisco Xavier, 1727.

Those marked with an asterisk are in the Museum; and the Museum's copy of the Letter is unique. A greater curiosity than any of these printed books exists in the shape of "a fragment of a Guarani catechism and syllabary, consisting of two wooden leaves paginated 4 and 13, on which characters are cut in relief precisely as in Chinese stereotypic block-printing." This reversion to primitive xylography is in the possession of Señor Lamas, an Argentine gentleman.

Another very interesting group of early South American books are the four printed at, or at least bearing the imprint of, Juli, a mission station in the Andes, on the brink of Lake Titicaca, 12,000 feet above the level of the sea. It is somewhat doubtful whether a printing-press was actually carried up so high, or whether the books were not rather printed at Lima, and forwarded to Juli; all, however, bear the imprint of the little missionary station, and date from the early years of the seventeenth century. All four are in the British Museum. One, the " Life and Miracles of our Lord," by Alonzo de Villegas, translated into Aymara and "accommodated to the capacity of the Indians" by Father Ludovico Bertonio, and containing both the Spanish and the Aymara text (Juli, 1612), enjoys a distinction rare among books, in having been made the subject of a sonnet :

Screened in the shadows Cordilleras fling,

Where straining breast scarce heaves, and straining eye
Sees nought 'twixt lifted sight and silent sky,

Save the huge condor hung on heavy wing:

Small skill, great love, there made me, light to bring
Where, sunk beneath the mountain far as I
Had birth aloft, the Indian's misery

Plied toil unblest for Europe's profiting.

The silver that his labour sunward drew

Now buys me, haply, in this foreign mart,

Where Love and Skill and Labour bartered are,

And it and I have interchanged our part :
Homeward it journeys to remote Peru,
Leaving me here beneath the Northern Star.

R. GARNETT.

147

HOW THINGS ARE DONE IN ONE AMERICAN LIBRARY.

II.

BOARD AND STAFF ORGANIZATION AND FINANCES.

HE St. Louis Public (Free) Library is a development from the Public School Library, established by the Public School Library Society in 1865. In accordance with the original design of its founders it was turned over to the City School Board in 1869, and was supported by that body as an adjunct of the system of public schools. The School Board, however, could never appropriate enough money to make the institution free; and the subscription fee, though gradually reduced from sixteen to eight shillings, proved an effectual bar to its use by the general public and by the pupils in the public schools, for whom it was specially intended. Experience in the United States has shown that any subscription fee, even four shillings a year, payable in instalments, is sufficient to restrict the benefits of a library to a small portion of the community. At the end of its first year as a free institution, the St. Louis Public Library had more than four times as many cardholders as it had before; and now, after five years, it has about ten times as many-in round numbers, fifty thousand to five thousand. In the United Kingdom, I believe, the immensely superior effectiveness of a free library, compared with the best subscription library, is universally conceded. The chief argument against the free library here was that people do not value what they do not pay for. That is one of those dangerous halftruths which, like the witches' prophecies in "Macbeth," have ever deceived and deluded mankind. Those who do

not value books enough to pay for the loan of them are just the people who most need them; and if they will not take books as a gift, their children, at least, will, and will thereby grow up better citizens and happier men and

women.

The Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Library consists of nine members, appointed by the Mayor, for a term of three years, three going out of office each year. It has been the judicious aim of the two mayors who have thus far appointed the Board to have it fairly representative of the different elements of the community. Three women have been members. The Board organizes each year by the election of a president and vice-president. The librarian is ex-officio secretary. The president appoints the standing committees for administration, auditing, and books. The executive committee consists of the president and vice-president, and the chairman of the other three committees. The respective functions of the committees are indicated by their names.

The rules give to the librarian the control of the staff, his action in appointing or dismissing being subject to confirmation by the Committee on Administration, and finally to the approval of the Board. Practically, all appointments are left to the librarian, and are based on the results of a competitive written examination. The grades of service below librarian and assistant librarian may be roughly classified and characterized as major heads of departments, heads of minor departments, senior clerks, junior clerks, apprentices, and pages. Except in cases of emergency, all appointments are made to one of the lowest grades. Candidates for the position of apprentice must be between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, and, to have any chance of success in the examination, must have the equivalent of a first-class high-school education, including some knowledge of at least two foreign languages. The language examination usually consists of easy translations from German, French, and Latin, but other languages are accepted