[BuRPEE] MODERN PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND THEIR METHODS 11 
Tts only rival is the British Museum, but the number of books in the 
Museum library are known definitely ; while the contents of the 
French National Library have not been actually counted since 1791. 
Besides the Bibliothéque Nationale, there are fifteen other libraries 
in Paris each containing above 30,000 volumes. In the rest of France 
there are some 350 free public libraries, containing approximately 
4,000,000 volumes, and 50,000 MSS. 
Germany has many libraries, seventy-two being counted in Berlin 
alone in 1875, with about 1,300,000 printed books. Munich contains 
several good libraries; and at Dresden there are about fifty. Stuttgart, 
Darmstadt, Gotha, are all strong library centres. 
In Austria there were in 1873-74 about 550 libraries, only 45 
of which were however of a public character. Of the 550, Vienna 
alone is credited with 101. 
The public libraries of Switzerland are numerous, but very 
small. Some 2000 were recorded in 1868, but of these only 18 had 
as many as 30,000 volumes. 
Italy boasts some of the most famous libraries of Europe, notably 
the Vatican Library at Rome, the Magliabecchiana and Laurentian 
libraries at Florence, and the Museo Borbonico at Naples. In 1865 a 
table of relative statistics was published by the Italian Government, 
which professed to show the remarkable fact that, with the exception of 
France, Italy possessed the largest total number of books of any country 
in Europe, the total contents of French libraries being 4,389,000, 
and of Italian libraries, 4,149,281. 
In Belgium and Holland, great libraries are found at Brussels, 
Ghent, The Hague, Leyden, etc. Denmark, Norway and Sweden also 
boast of many notable libraries. At Madrid, in Spain, and Lisbon, 
in Portugal, the Biblioteca Nacional contains several hundred 
thousand books and valuable MSS. covering the literature of their 
respective countries. In Russia, the chief libraries are at St. 
Petersburg and Moscow. 
LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
The history of public libraries in the United States goes back 
to the early part of the nineteenth century. The Boston Public 
Library, in fact, claims to trace its existence back to the middle of the 
seventeenth century, but it was not until nearly two hundred years 
afterwards that a public library in the modern sense of the term, 
was established there. _ 
In 1817 Dr. Jesse Torrey, Jr., published a pamphlet entitled 
“The intellectual torch,” in which he made an earnest plea for “the 
