This, and the library of the Royal Academy, which the society had also acquired, formed a small but excellent nucleus, and with, the produce of the public subscription of 1884 it was enabled to stock its library with many of the best standard works of the time in Spanish and French, and open to the Puerto Ricans of all classes the doors of the first long-wished-for public library.

Since then it has contributed in no small degree to the enlightenment of the better part of the laboring classes in the capital, till it was closed at the commencement of the war.

During the transition period the books were transferred from one locality to another, and in the process the best works disappeared, until the island’s first civil governor, Charles H. Allen, at the suggestion of Commissioner of Education Martin G. Brumbaugh, rescued the remainder and made it the nucleus of the first American free library.

The second Puerto Rican public library was opened by Don Ramon Santaella, October 15, 1880, in the basement of the Town Hall.  It began with 400 volumes, and possesses to-day 6,361 literary and didactic books in different languages.

The Puerto Rican Atheneum Library was established in 1876.  Its collection of books, consisting principally of Spanish and French literature, is an important one, both in numbers and quality.  It has been enriched by accessions of books from the library of the extinct Society of Friends of the Country.  It is open to members of the Atheneum only, or to visitors introduced by them.

The Casino Espanol possesses a small but select library with a comfortable reading-room.  Its collection of books and periodicals is said to be the richest and most varied in the island.  It was founded in 1871.

The religious association known under the name of Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul had a small circulating library of religious works duly approved by the censors.  The congregation was broken up in 1887 and the library disappeared.

The Provincial Institute of Secondary Education, which was located in the building now occupied by the free library and legislature, possessed a small pedagogical library which shared the same fate as that of the Society of Friends of the Country.

The Spanish Public Works Department possessed another valuable collection of books, mostly on technical and scientific subjects.  A number of books on other than technical subjects, probably from the extinct libraries just referred to, have been added to the original collection, and the whole, to the number of 1,544 volumes in excellent condition, exist under the care of the chief of the Public Works Department.

Besides the above specified libraries of a public and collegiate character, there are some private collections of books in the principal towns of the island.  Chief among these is the collection of Don Fernando Juncos, of San Juan, which contains 15,000 volumes of classic and preceptive literature and social and economic science, 1,200 volumes of which bear the author’s autographs.