Free Lectures in Connection with Free Public Libraries. 357 it, and apart from this special item, the expenses were for a long time kept within the amount fixed by the committee, and in no year has it exceeded twenty pounds for the course of fourteen or fifteen lectures. The average attendance has been about three hundred, but frequently the room, which is estimated to seat four hundred, has had an audience of nearer six hundred persons, while hundreds have had to be turned away from the doors. 1 We are in urgent need of a larger room, and we are not without hope that speedily a suitable public hall will be erected in connection with our public buildings. I may add that the only method of advertising adopted has been by means of one hundred window bills for each lecture. In 1884 the committee of the Birmingham Free Libraries had under consideration a scheme for the delivery of lectures on the contents of the reference library, and their use to students, by gentlemen specially qualified in the several departments of literature and science. The first of these lectures was given by the chairman of the committee, Mr. Alderman G. J. Johnson, on November 12, 1884, his subject being the books on law and jurisprudence. This was followed by lectures on the classics, on legal and constitutional history, on the Shakespeariana, botany, art, and other classes of books in the Reference Library, the first series being published in a volume which is probably well known to most members of this Association. The admission to these lectures was by tickets, which were freely distributed, but whether from a want of popularity or from some other cause, the second series of lectures was not long continued, and hence the printed reports of the two or three lectures after the issue of the first series were never, so far as I am aware, collected into a second volume, and can only be met with in pamphlet form. In 1886, as a result of the popularity of the Aston lectures, the adjoining district of Handsworth took up the question, and, tentatively, arranged for occasional lectures, at monthly intervals, during the winter of 1886-7. When the question came up at the beginning of the following winter season, of continuing the experiment, however, the proposal was negatived, as the com- mittee felt that the income of the library was " sufficient only for the necessities of book buying, and other strictly library 1 During the session of 1893-4 "on every occasion, except one, large numbers had to be refused admission owing to the crowded state oi the room." Annual Report > 1893-4.
