it is only part of a system planned for the service of the metropolitan area.
The park system is quite unique among American cities. The Common, a park of 48 acres, in the centre of the city, has been a public reservation since 1634, and no city park in the world is cherished more affectionately for historical associations. Adjoining it is the Public Garden of 24 acres (1859), part of the made area of the city. Commonwealth Avenue, one of the Back Bay streets running from the foot of the Public Garden, is one of the finest residence streets of the country. It is 240 ft. wide, with four rows of trees shading the parking of its central mall, and is a link through the Back Bay Fens with the beautiful outer park system. The park system consists of two concentric rings, the inner being the city system proper, the outer the metropolitan system undertaken by the commonwealth in co-operation with the city. The former has been laid out since 1875, and includes upwards of 2300 acres, with more than 100 m. of walks, drives and rides. Its central ornament is Franklin Park (527 acres). The metropolitan system, which extends around the city on a radius of 10 to 12 m., was begun in 1893. It embraces over 10,000 acres, including the Blue Hill reservation (about 5000 acres), the highest land in eastern Massachusetts, a beautiful reservation of forest, crag and pond known as Middlesex Fells, two large beach bath reservations on the harbour at Revere and Hull (Nantasket), and the boating section of the Charles river. At the end of 1907 more than $13,000,000 had been expended on the system. Including the local parks of the cities and towns of the metropolitan district there are over 17,000 acres of pleasure grounds within the metropolitan park district. Boston was the pioneer municipality of the country in the establishment of open-air gymnasiums. A great improvement, planned for many years, was brought nearer by the completion of the new Cambridge Bridge. This improvement was projected to include the damming of the Charles river, and the creation of a great freshwater basin, with drive-ways of reclaimed land along the shores, and other adornments, somewhat after the model of the Alster basins at Hamburg.
Art and Literature.—The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 (though there were art exhibits collected from 1826 onward) and its present building was erected in 1908. It has one of the finest collections of casts in existence, a number of original pieces of Greek statuary, the second-best collection in the world of Aretine ware, the finest collection of Japanese pottery, and probably the largest and finest of Japanese paintings in existence. Among the memorials to men of Massachusetts (a large part of them Bostonians) commemorated by monuments in the Common, the Public Garden, the grounds of the state house, the city hall, and other public places of the city, are statues of Charles Sumner, Josiah Quincy and John A. Andrew by Thomas Ball; of Generals Joseph Hooker and William F. Bartlett, and of Rufus Choate by Daniel C. French; of W. L. Garrison and Charles Devens by Olin L. Warner; of Samuel Adams by Anne Whitney; of John Winthrop and Benjamin Franklin by R. S. Greenough; of Edward Everett (W. W. Story), Colonel W. Prescott (Story), Horace Mann (E. Stebbins), Daniel Webster (H. Powers), W. E. Channing (H. Adams), N. P. Banks (H. H. Kitson), Phillips Brooks (A. St Gaudens), and J. B. O’Reilly (D. C. French).
Among other important monuments are a group by J. Q. A. Ward commemorating the first proof of the anaesthetic properties of ether, made in 1846 in the Massachusetts General Hospital by Dr W. T. G. Morton; an emancipation group of Thomas Ball with a portrait statue of Lincoln; a fine equestrian statue, by the same sculptor, of Washington, one of the best works in the country (1869); an army and navy monument in the Common by Martin Millmore, in memory of the Civil War; another (1888) recording the death of those who fell in the Boston Massacre of 1770; statues of Admiral D. G. Farragut (H. H. Kitson), Leif Ericson (Anne Whitney), and Alexander Hamilton (W. Rimmer); and a magnificent bronze bas-relief (1897) by Augustus St Gaudens commemorating the departure from Boston of Colonel Robert G. Shaw with the first regiment of negro soldiers enlisted in the Civil War. There is an art department of the city government, under unpaid commissioners, appointed by the mayor from candidates named by local art and literary institutions; and without their approval no work of art can now become the property of the city.
The public library, containing 922,348 volumes in January 1908, is the second library of the country in size, and is the largest free circulating library in the world (circulation 1907, 1,529,111 volumes). There was a public municipal library in Boston before 1674—probably in 1653; but it was burned in 1747 and was apparently never replaced. The present library (antedated by several circulating, social and professional collections) may justly be said to have had its origin in the efforts of the Parisian, Alexandre Vattemare (1796–1864), from 1830 on, to foster international exchanges. From 1847 to 1851 he arranged gifts from France to American libraries aggregating 30,655 volumes, and a gift of 50 volumes by the city of Paris in 1843 (reciprocated in 1849 with more than 1000 volumes contributed by private citizens) was the nucleus of the Boston public library. Its legal foundation dates from 1848. Among the special collections are the George Ticknor library of Spanish and Portuguese books (6393 vols.), very full sets of United States and British public documents, the Bowditch mathematical library (7090 vols.), the Galatea collection on the history of women (2193 vols.), the Barton library, including one of the finest existing collections of Shakespeariana (3309 vols., beside many in the general library), the A. A. Brown library of music (9886 vols.), a very full collection on the anthropology and ethnology of Europe, and more than 100,000 volumes on the history, biography, geography and literature of the United States. The library is supported almost entirely by municipal appropriations, though holding also considerable trust funds ($388,742 in 1905). The other notable book-collections of the city include those of the Athenaeum, founded in 1807 (about 230,000 vols. and pamphlets), the Massachusetts Historical Society (founded 1791; 50,300), the Boston medical library (founded 1874; about 80,000), the New England Historic-Genealogical Society (founded 1845; 33,750 volumes and 34,150 pamphlets), the state library (founded 1826; 140,000), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (founded 1780; 30,000), the Boston Society of Natural History (founded 1830; about 35,000 volumes and 27,000 pamphlets).
The leading educational institutions are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the largest purely scientific and technical school in the country, opened to students (including women) in 1865, four years after the granting of a charter to Prof. W. B. Rogers, the first president; Boston University (chartered in 1869; Methodist Episcopal; co-educational); the New England Conservatory of Music (co-educational; private; 1867, incorporated 1880), the largest in the United States, having 2400 students in 1905–1906; the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy (1852); the Massachusetts Normal Art School (1873); the School of Drawing and Painting (1876) of the Museum of Fine Arts; Boston College (1860), Roman Catholic, under the Society of Jesus; St John’s Theological Seminary (1880), Roman Catholic; Simmons College (1899) for women, and several departments of Harvard University. The Institute of Technology has an exceptional reputation for the wide range of its instruction and its high standards of scholarship. It was a pioneer in introducing as a feature of its original plans laboratory instruction in physics, mechanics and mining. The architects of the United States navy are sent here for instruction in their most advanced courses. Boston University was endowed by Isaac Rich (1801–1872), a Boston fish-merchant, Lee Claflin (1791–1871), a shoe manufacturer and a benefactor of Wesleyan University and of Wilbraham Seminary, and Jacob Sleeper. It has been co-educational from the beginning. Its faculties of theology—founded in 1841 at Newbury, Vt., as the Biblical Institute; in 1847–1867 in Concord, N.H.; and in 1867–1871 the Boston Theological Seminary—law, music, medicine, liberal
