Publisher's Synopsis
The money to found a British Museum was raised by a lottery in the middle of the last century. Sir Hans Sloane having offered his books and museum of natural history to Parliament, for less than half its value (20,000 .), it was purchased, together with the famous Harleian and Cottonian MSS., and deposited in Montague House, Bloomsbury, which had been bought of the Earl of Halifax, for the sum of 10,250 . Of the present British Museum this beginning forms a very insignificant part. The nucleus was established however; and soon eminent men, who valued their literary and scientific collections as storehouses that should be accessible to all classes of students, began to turn their attention to the collections in Montague House."
