6 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
of 150 to 7. Winchester followed the next year; and in 1860 Bir- 
mingham, Bolton, Manchester and Oxford came into line. In 1853 
Blackburn and Sheffield in the north, and Cambridge and Ipswich in 
the east, accepted the new Act. Liverpool had already come in under 
a local act. Airdrie in Scotland, and Cork in Ireland were the first 
towns to adopt the Library Act outside of England and Wales. Others 
followed during the next few years. 
In 1869 Mr. Baines, M.P., moved for a return of public libraries, 
which was furnished to Parliament in 1870. This Return, shows, up 
to the end of 1868, forty-six adoptions of the Act, or local acts equiva- 
lent thereto; twenty-nine places had established fifty-two libraries, 
with nearly half a million volumes and a yearly circulation of 3,400,000 
volumes. The amount raised by rate for public libraries and museums 
was at least £25,400 per annum. 
In 1877 a Conference of libraries was held in the lecture theatre 
of the London Institution—the first gathering of the kind in Europe. 
Two such conferences had already been held in the United States, the 
first at New York in 1853, and the second at Philadelphia in 1876, 
during the Centennial Exhibition. The London Conference was ~ 
largely an outcome of the Philadelphia meeting, which had been so 
successful as to encourage English librarians to attempt something of 
the same kind. There were 218 librarians present, representing 139 
libraries, of which the United States contributed 17, France 4, Italy 1,. 
Belgium 1, Denmark 2, Australia 1, and Great Britain and Ireland 113. 
Out of this Conference grew, among other things, the Library Asso- 
ciation of the United Kingdom, the formation of which marked the 
commencement of a new period in the history of the free library in 
Great Britain. One of the most important matters discussed at the 
Conference was the question of printing the catalogue of the British 
Museum, a colossal undertaking, which was commenced in 1881 and 
completed by the end of the century. I shall have a few words to 
say about this catalogue later on. 
In 1879 the Birmingham Free Library was destroyed by fire, and 
a number of irreplaceable literary treasures were lost, including the 
greater part of the splendid collection of Shakespeariana. Only 1,000 
volumes from the reference library of 50,000 were saved from the 
flames. A new and larger library, however, sprang up in its place, 
and now ranks among the foremost libraries of England. The new 
central library was opened on the 1st June, 1882, when speeches were 
delivered by John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, and others. It is 
perhaps worth mentioning that Mr. Bright had also taken a leading 
part in the inauguration of the Manchester free libraries, some thirty 
years previously, when, besides his own, speeches were delivered by 
