9 



their papers regularly to the reading room of the Society. The 

 sixty-five transactions represent a great deal of valuable re- 

 search and have placed in permanent form stores of informa- 

 tion which would have otherwise been lost to the country. On 

 the other hand several tons of newspapers are stored away in 

 the attic rooms of the City Hall. In St. Paul the Historical 

 Society, which has rooms in the Capitol, binds up all the papers 

 of the State of Minnesota. The time may come when our 

 Society will do this. The Society was gratified at receiving- 

 last year from the proprietors of the Free Press a complete 

 set of twenty-two years' well bound volumes of that paper, 

 valued at $200. This will be a complete and indispensable aid 

 for the future historian of the City of Winnipeg. 



CANADIANA. 



One of the most interesting departments in which the 

 Society has aimed at completeness is in books published in 

 Canada or bearing on Canada. The library committee has a 

 standing authority to purchase any book of value published in 

 Canada. Sets ranging from Rattray's Scot in Canada to the 

 Canadian Cyclopaedia, books of travel in large numbers, and 

 Royal Society transactions are here ; so, too, the travels of 

 Alex. Ross, Harman, Keating, Ross Cox, Franchere and the 

 early explorers ; and the splendid editions of Lewis and Clark 

 (4 volumes), Zebulon M. Pike (3 volumes), Forty Years a 

 Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri. These, all edited by the 

 late Capt. Coues, make up a series of profound interest relat- 

 ing to the border life of Canada. Four hundred volumes of 

 Canadian life, travel, history and adventure, it is safe to say, 

 are on the shelves of the library. 



ARCTIC LITERATURE. 



Britain has ever been the promoter of Arctic exploration and 

 the Northwest Passage. An enormous literature has grown 



