STUDIES ON MUSEUMS AND KINDRED INSTITUTIONS. 569 

 33. TECHNICAL COLLEGE; MITCHELL LIBRARY. 



The great city of (Tlasgow, which enjoys the best government of 

 any of the cities of the Island Kingdom, would certainly, on closer 

 study, have offered many other things worthy of examination in rela- 

 tion to museum matters, Init my time was too limited. 



1 shall mention, in addition, the Glasgow and West of Scotland 

 Technical College, founded in 1886, with an annual expenditure of 

 $100,000, (>00 day and 4,000 evening pupils, (JT instructors, and a 

 library of 15,000 volumes; also the Mitchell Library, established in 

 1877, with an endowment of $350,000 by Stephen Mitchell, an annual 

 expenditure of $16,500, and 145,000 volumes. There are probabl}- 

 500,000 volumes annually consulted, for the librar}?^ allows no books to 

 be carried away. The daily attendance is approximately 2,000. To 

 prevent a conflagration from flying sparks tubes are laid upon the 

 roof with small apertures through which, upon the opening of a cock 

 in the cellar, sufficient water flows to extinguish any fire. This is an 

 arrangement very worthy of imitation. (See, concerning this excel- 

 lent library, J. J. Ogle, The Free Library, 1897, pp. 288-293; and 

 F. eT. Burgoyne, Library Construction, 1897, pp. 162-166.) 



XL— LIVERPOOL. 



Liverpool is a seaport and manufacturing town of nearly 700,000 

 inha])itants; somewhat hilly, and notas highly smoked upas Manchester, 

 but also black. For this reason the good efl'ect of the ver}' impressive 

 principal square is injured. It is similar to the forum of a Roman 

 city, with St. George's Hall, a building like a Greco-Roman temple, 

 650 feet long and 200 feet wide, for public assemblages, concerts, etc., 

 built in 1838-1854, at a cost of $1,500,000; a row of monuments, and 

 a long, extending group of museum buildings in the Greek style. 

 Outside of these Liverpool possesses very little of talue for my pur- 

 poses. It has a university college, which is a portion of Victoria 

 University, as mentioned j)reviousl_v (see paragraph on Owens College, 

 in Manchester), with from 500 to 600 students and over loo instructors. 

 There is also an observatory. 



Glasgow, November 24, 1903: I am glad to say the heating and ventilation is giving 

 very good results and I do not think one can at present get a better or cheaper 

 system to do the work required. One alteration I have made is that in place of 

 washing the air at the screens I have put up scrim screens and filter the air through 

 the cloth and so do away with the water, which was causing dampness in the buildings 

 and doing harm to the old paintings and other ol)jects. When one considers that 

 our large buildings can l)e kept at about 60" in the winter months by a daily supply 

 of 7 tons of washed pearls 'screened dross,' costing at present 7s. Id. per ton, you 

 will see that the system used is cheap as well as efficient. I may say the floor space 

 of our building is as follows: Picture galleries, 21,450 .square feet; nmseuni galleries, 

 21,330 square feet; central hall, courts, and corridors, which are marble, 45,000 square 

 feet; grand total of floor space, 87,786 square feet. 



