In 1883, Jan. 27, the Librarian suggested 'that all Fellows and ex-Fellows of Colleges should be entitled to have books out of the Library'; the suggestion was not adopted. On the same day, 'Mr. ---- (---- College) and Dr. ---- were placed on the list of persons specially entitled.' On March 3 of the same year, 'Dr. Frankfurter's application to be placed on the privileged list of borrowers was assented to.' There we have it at last, in black and white--_the privileged list of borrowers_, as unstatutable and as illegal a thing as could well be permitted. The words '_let it be lawful for the Curators to borrow books for learned men_,' (always supposing the Latin not to be downright nonsense,) cannot convey to the Curators the power to let other people borrow books; for if they could, then any words may have any meaning, which comes to the same thing as saying that they have no meaning at all. Yet it is on these words, and on these words alone, that the 'borrowers' list' has been made to depend; though how educated men can have extracted from this statute any meaning whatever which would justify, or even seem, in the most distant way, to justify the act of conveying to others the power to borrow books from the library is one of the most astonishing things that I ever met with in the whole course of my life. But it will be said that the Bodleian Curators for thirteen years understood _mutuari_ to mean 'lend', and therefore they might institute a 'borrowers' list'. It is an astonishing, not to say staggering, fact that they did so understand it, yet the borrowers' list is none the less illegal. Nay, I have heard a Curator in his place maintain, that as there could be no doubt what the University intended when it passed this statute, _mutuari_ in this place must mean 'lend'. Much as I admired the boldness of the assertion, I was unable to commend either the law or the logic of it; the consequences which would at once follow from the position, that if the intentions of a legislative body are clear it matters not how it expresses them, are too palpably absurd to find acceptance with ordinary minds. However, let it be supposed, that instead of _mutuari_ the word actually used were _commodare_. You are still no better off. The University on this hypothesis gives to the Curators as a board the power of lending a specific book to a specific person, and that is all. It does not give the Curators the power to invest any person or persons with the right or privilege of borrowing books, still less does it convey the power of creating a class of persons who have such a right or privilege. This is not only clear to plain common sense, but, as I am advised, is plain as a matter of law; and I am further assured that, if any book is damaged or lost in consequence of the Curators persisting in such a course, they become themselves personally liable to the University.