Libraries. 5 



the departmental libraries. There is also a certain amount of 

 duplication due for the most part to the need for working copies 

 of some books. 



The several departmental libraries are under the charge of 

 the respective Keepers of the Departments, who usually relegate 

 the task of immediate superintendence to one or other of their 

 Assistants, an Attendant being told off in each case to perform 

 the routine work. 



The General Library when first formed in 1881 was governed 

 by a Committee of the four Keepers of Departments, the 

 Assistant in charge, Mr. B. B. Woodward, who was appointed in 

 October of that year, reporting in the first instance (October, 

 1881 to June, 1883) to the Keeper of Botany, subsequently 

 (July, 1883 to April, 1884) to the Keeper of Zoology, and since 

 May, 1884, to the Director, who from that time took over the 

 control of this library. 



In February, 1888, it was resolved that a general alphabetical 

 Authors' Catalogue of the whole library of the Museum, exclusive 

 of minor separata, should be printed. With the aid of temporary 

 assistance the cataloguing on a uniform system of all the 

 libraries was thereupon begun, and, by 1897, so far completed 

 that a grant for printing was obtained. The first sheet of this 

 Catalogue was passed for pi*ess in January, 1898, and, by the 

 end of 1900, sixty-six sheets (A-Endea.) had been printed off.* 



2. CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OP THE PRINCIPAL ACCESSIONS 

 TO THE END OP 1900. 



1753. 



When Sir Hans Sloane's Collections became the property of 

 the nation in 1753 his manuscript catalogues of them, the copy 

 of his "Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados . . . and 

 Jamaica," etc., annotated in his own handwriting, with the 

 original drawings of the specimens of Plants from which the 

 plates were drawn, and a copy of Bay's " Historia Plantarum," 

 which he had used in connection with his Herbarium, were kept 

 with his collections instead of being incorporated with the 



* The first volume, A-D, was issued in August, 1903. 



