At length the Curators obtained their desire. On March 25, 1873, a form of statute was proposed by one Head of a House and seconded by another, and on May 2, 1873, it was carried without a division in the following shape: (Tit. XX. iii. § 11. 10.) Liceat Curatoribus, sicut mos fuit, libros impressos et manuscriptos, scientiæ causa, viris doctis sive Academicis sive externis mutuari: that is to say, _Let it be lawful for the Curators, as the custom has been, to borrow books printed and manuscript in the interest of knowledge for learned men, whether Members of the University or not_. A board of grave and learned men--_viri variis doctrinis et literis imbuti_, as the statute says--wish to do openly, what they had been in the habit of doing, as it would appear, unknown to Council, and against its wishes (for it 'struck out the proposal to lend books out of the Library'): there is something droll in that, but it is nothing to what came of it. They petition for leave to _lend_, walk off perfectly contented with a permission to _borrow_, and nobody sees the joke! 'Reform' seems not only to have impaired our knowledge of Latin, but to have diminished our sense of the ridiculous--a most dolorous result. That Convocation intended by this strangely worded statute to convey to the Curators the power to _lend_ books is beyond question; it is equally beyond question that it conveyed the power to _borrow_ them, for in good Latin and in our statute Latin alike, _mutuari_ means not to lend, but to borrow, as every Latin Dictionary from the Hortus Vocabulorum down to Lewis and Short testifies; and as to our statute Latin we find: quantum magister ... potest de cista de Guildeforde mutuari (Anstey, p. 99); quod magister regens mutuari possit quadraginta solidos (_ibid._ p. 132); de eadem mutuari poterit ad usum suum proprium.... quinque marcas (_ibid._ p. 338). As _mutuari_ is correctly used in the barbarous language of our old statutes, so is it in the more polished Latinity of the Laudian code, in which the word occurs once, and I think only once, and as the devil of mischief will have it, in the Bodleian Statute itself, where 'e cista D. Thomæ Bodley mutuari' means 'to borrow from Sir Thomas Bodley's chest'. The meaning of the word then is clear beyond dispute, and what it means in one part of the statutes it must mean in another. There is plenty of barbarous Latin in our statute book, but in every case it is justified or excused by long usage, or by the fact that other learned bodies have constantly used the same or similar language; but the statute of 1873 is probably the only one either in ancient or modern times, where without necessity, without precedent, and without warning, a word which means and always has meant one thing is used under the erroneous impression that it means another, and that not by schoolboys, but by their elders. A statute, however, means what it plainly says: with the intentions of a legislative body we have no concern except in