Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/15

 Rh in from time to time from intelligent benefactors, they would have been in a somewhat sad case. This is partly to be accounted for by the fact that they had no stable sources of income of any great amount. But apart from this, there is no blinking the fact that the interests of the libraries did not greatly concern the responsible authorities; and that they showed no great zeal in extending them, nor care in preserving them. So late as 1717, the whole stock at King's College Library, according to a catalogue completed in that year, amounted just to 2,857 books. Nearly a century later, namely in 1802, the stock had risen to only 9,486 volumes, notwithstanding that in the interval it had received numerous gifts. An interesting and instructive light is thrown upon the spirit and tone of those in power by what took place when 'one of their numbsr endeavoured, to his honour be it said, to secure for the libraries the consideration which they required and deserved. This would-be reformer was William Ogilvie, "Professor of humanity and Lecturer on political and natural history, antiquities, criticism and rhetoric in the University and King's College of Aberdeen." (You see in those days they knew nothing of specialists, and took care to provide every man with a sufficiently wide field on which to discourse at large.) But William Ogilvie was no ordinary man; though it is only quite recently that the full proportion of his remarkable qualities has come fully into view. Just two years ago, as is doubtless known to several here, a work of his was republished, accompanied by biographical and other notes from the hand of a solicitor in this town, Mr. D. C. Macdonald. The work thus republished first saw the light in 1782, under the title of An Essay on the Right of Property in Land. It was published anonymously; and we do not wonder at this when we come to know the very radical ideas promulgated in it on a subject which is now more than ever agitating the public mind; and that on lines which this north-country professor unobtrusively laid down over a century ago. A man of ideas so far ahead of his day and generation could hardly fail to be a thorn in the flesh of his staid, easy-going colleagues, and not least so in the very matter, now before us, of the attitude of the university authorities to the libraries under their charge. As early as 1764, the very year of his appointment as a professor, he promulgated a scheme for raising funds to purchase books for each library in every alternate year; and though it came to nothing, it got into a printed form which survives to this day as a monument of Ogilvie's broad