IT must be the experience of any graduate of Oxford or Cambridge who is residing at a distance from those university towns that a serious obstacle to the prosecution of research arises from the impossibility of consulting the university libraries, and the absence of any provision for borrowing volumes, or obtaining references under arrangements similar to those pertaining at the libraries of the Royal and other scientific societies. Moreover, while Oxford and Cambridge possess the special privilege of acquiring free copies of books copyrighted in England, there are now many universities in this country which are far too poor to keep up even a decently respectable library in any branch of science.