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before the Gallery was opened at 29 Great George Street, and excluding the Exhibition year of 1862, an annual average of nearly 10,000 persons, or at the daily rate of under 100 persons, has visited it. Lord Henry Lennox estimated the cost of each visitor at the time of his strictures between 16 and 18 shillings; that sum must now be reduced; still there is no doubt that it is, proportionately to its number of visitors, the most costly of all our public galleries. According to the last report, 133 portraits have been purchased, and 58 presented; making a total of only 191 portraits acquired by the trustees in six years. A very drastic commentary on this kind of management is afforded by the proposal of Lord Derby for forming a series of national portrait exhibitions at the South Kensington Museum. This board of trustees, expressly created to look after national portraits, is passed by altogether by a late Prime Minister, who sends his suggestion to the Lord President of the Council at South Kensington. What Lord Derby now proposes to do ought to have been done six years ago, and would certainly have been done but for the impediment of a board of trustees!

The foregoing rapid survey proves conclusively that those institutions for which there is a Minister of the Crown responsible in Parliament, and where individual direction exists for the management, as at the Kew Botanic Gardens and Museum, the South Kensington Museum, and the Geological Museum in Jermyn Street, are flourishing and progressive, whilst in those where there is no direct parliamentary responsibility, and the management is in the hands of a board, as at the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and Patent' Museum, confusion, discord, languor, incompetency, and extravagance are found.

It is idle to discuss such questions of details as separation, space, site, buildings, and internal management, until the one cardinal basis has been established of a clear direct parliamentary responsibility. Parliament should peremptorily refuse to consider any of these questions until it has a Minister who can stand up and say, I, on behalf of the Government, am respon'sible for the recommendations I make, and the estimates I submit, and if you don't accept them, find a substitute for me.' The failures of board management for the last fifty years are all concisely summarised in Lord Henry Lennox's speech in 1862; and it is puerile in those who advocate reform in these institutions not to have got rid of the multifarious boards as they now exist.

We are by no means advocates for the absolute abolition of

trustees, as some have proposed. Such a proceeding would seem to be as ungracious as impolitic-unwise as well as unnecessary. All might be retained, and the numbers even increased by the names of the highest representatives of science, literature, and the arts, so as to consolidate the representatives of the several institutions into a council for science and art. Put at their head the Lord President of the Council, who would summon them to meet either in general assembly or in select committees to advise on special subjects as consultative bodies only, when their services would be truly valuable. It should, however, be made quite clear that they have no voice. whatever in the management of the expenditure of any institution, which would rest sole and undivided in the charge of a responsible Member of the Government.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons will probably acknowledge that it is impossible they' can efficiently administer the expenditure of 100,000l. a year in Bloomsbury, and that they are not aided in the work by the presence of any standing committee, still less by the whole body of trustees. Surely these high officers are indifferent to the patronage of appointing some few worn-out butlers to the post of attendants, which would be much better filled by policemen. At the time when the Legislature created the British Museum by lottery and trustees out of the vendors of the property purchased, the management and purchases for many years, exclusive of the cost of buildings, did not exceed the income which the endowment from the lottery (30,0007.) and Major Edwards' bequest (about 20,0007.) provided. But whilst the Parliamentary votes have gradually crept up to 100,000l. a year, the old vicious mode of board administration has not only remained unchanged, but become rather worse as an executive, by additions to the numbers of the trustees. No one will venture to contend that it is beyond the competency

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Whilst Sir Roderick Murchison has full experience of the success of the Geological Museum under his own direction, his vision seems to be so dimmed as a trustee of the British Museum that he advocates the management of the Natural History there by a'sub-committee,' who should suggest to the standing committee,' who would report to the general body of trustees! If Sir Philip Egerton,' he says, 'would attend, and if we could get the assistance of Sir Benjamin Brodie and the President of the College of Physicians, as well as of Lord Cawdor, we should work well, and do *the business effectively.' Would Sir Roderick substitute a similar committee at Jermyn Street for himself?

VOL. CXXIII. NO. CCLI.

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of Parliament, or would be the slightest breach of faith with the family trustees or the elected trustees, to relieve them from the business of expending the annual vote of 100,000l. They were never made trustees for the work which by imperceptible degrees has passed into their hands. Take away this money and the Sloane, Harley, Towneley, Elgin, and Payne Knight trustees will still remain fully possessed of their original powers and duties.

Judging from the past, we have little hope that any Government will take up this most necessary administrative reform of its own motion. It cannot become a party question, and seems to be crossed by all sorts of personal influences. But the work might be done at once if those members of Parliament who complain annually at the present most unsatisfactory state of things--if Lord Elcho, or Lord Henry Lennox, or Mr. Gregory, or Mr. John Stuart Mill, a man who thoroughly understands the evils of Board Management, would only follow the example of Mr. Hume, who in 1840 organised an association of members of Parliament and others to promote the opening of national monuments to the public, which succeeded, and do the like for abolishing the executive management of public collections through boards of trustees. Another fulcrum to act on both Government and Parliament might be found in an association of the local museums and institutions throughout the country to participate in the use of the superfluous objects and pictures at present an incumbrance to the central institutions themselves. But such a circulation of superfluous objects is just one of those measures altogether dependent on the administrative reform of the parent institutions, and cannot be dealt with separately. If local institutions will persuade their county and borough members to take an interest in it, the Government may be emboldened to grapple with the anomalous constitutions which at present retard the progress and sound organisation of our institutions of science and art, and to substitute the Parliamentary responsibility of a Minister for the ineffective administration of irresponsible boards.*

* As we close this page the melancholy intelligence of the death of Sir Charles Eastlake reaches us. His manifold services to the arts in this country were not more remarkable than his blameless character and his high attainments; and he leaves a blank in our society which it will indeed be most difficult to fill by another.

ART. IV.—Traictie de la première invention des Monnaies de NICOLE ORESME; Textes Français et Latin d'après les Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale; et Traité de la Monnoie de COPERNIC, Texte Latin et traduction Française. Publiés at annotés par M. L. WOLOWSKI, Membre de l'Institut. Paris. 8vo. 1864.

THE

HE first of these Treatises on Money is the work of a schoolman and a bishop, who was buried about five hundred years ago in the choir of his own cathedral at Lisieux, and who had well-nigh passed away from the memory of men, when a lucky accident drew the attention of a German professor of our own day to this remarkable prelate, and the zealous researches of M. Wolowski have since restored him to his proper position as one of the Fathers of economical science. The second Treatise on the same subject, which is included in this volume, is from the pen of Copernicus, who seems to have applied to the relations of society the same searching intellect and sound reasoning which arrested the sun in its course and restored the true economy of the heavens. We are extremely indebted to M. Wolowski for the care he has bestowed on this curious publication. He has collected the manuscripts, revised the texts, translated a portion of the original Latin essay, and thrown a flood of light on the personal history of Nicole Oresme, their forgotten author. But it is not merely a love of antiquity that has directed his labours. The most curious part of the discovery is that this treatise, written in France about the year 1373, at one of the darkest and most turbulent periods of the history of that kingdom, a few years after the battle of Poictiers, and in the earlier years of the reign of Charles le Sage, is an exposition of the theory of money, so clear that it might have proceeded from the pen of Adam Smith, and so correct that it would not be disowned by any member of the Political Economy Club. When it is remembered how long and how generally the grossest fallacies prevailed on this subject-if, indeed, they are even now dissipated; when we call to mind the volumes which have been written to reduce the definitions of value and of price to the simplicity of truth; when we are reminded of the gross and scandalous abuses by which the princes of the Middle Ages were continually endeavouring to eke out their resources by tampering with the currency, and that these practices have not entirely ceased in some parts of the world, even amidst the lights of our own age; it is nothing short of marvellous that a churchman of the fourteenth cen

tury should have left behind him a succinct treatise, in which the principles that govern the great questions of the currency, of coin, and of exchange are stated with equal force and precision.

It has hitherto been acknowledged that the true theory of money was first explained with admirable clearness and force of reasoning by Locke, in his Considerations of the lowering ' of Interest and raising the Value of Money;' and no doubt it was on this solid basis that Montague and Somers rested their vigorous measures for the restoration of the British currency to its true intrinsic value in 1695. But there is scarcely a point in Locke's Treatise which Nicole Oresme had not some glimpse of. In more recent times the late Mr. Senior wrote a very able paper on Money, which is justly considered to be one of the most lucid and demonstrative of his economical writings; but as the true principles of the science are few in number and uniform in their application, when once ascertained, we are not sure that he added anything essential to the doctrine of Nicolas Oresme, of whom, in all probability, he had never heard. We shall shortly lay before our readers the leading propositions of this remarkable Essay, but we must first inform them by what means it was brought to light, and then give them some account of its author.

The discovery, for such it may be called, of this work is due to M. Wilhelm Roscher, a distinguished Professor of Political Economy in the University of Leipsig, whose curiosity was excited by the casual mention, in some forgotten author, of a treatise by Nicolas Oresme De Origine et Jure necnon et de 'Mutationibus Monetarum.' This Essay had been reprinted in 1589 in the Sacra Bibliotheca sanctorum Patrum of Margarinus de la Bigne, from the first edition, printed by Thomas Keet in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. Of this edition one copy exists in the Imperial Library at Paris. In that mag.nificent collection is also to be found a printed copy (without date) of the contemporary French translation. But the manuscript which has been collated and used by M. Wolowski in the present edition dates from the fifteenth century. It belonged to an ecclesiastical library at Paris down to the Revolution, and is still in its original binding, stamped with the arms of the first owner. Two Latin MSS. of the Essay also exist, one in the library at Poictiers, and another in the Burgundian Library at Brussels.

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Having procured a copy of one of the earlier editions of the work, M. Roscher proceeded to examine it, when,' he exclaims, what was my surprise to find in my hands a theory of Money,

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