there is just the same difficulty, which will hardly be overcome till the laws of nature are reformed, and light condescends to travel in convenient curves. The regular officials have quite enough to do, if they attend only to their necessary work, which pins them down to one spot, and totally precludes them from exercising (even if they possessed it) the saintly privilege of bilocation. To come back to the point: books are badly used in the library itself. Now I ask any man of common sense, whether it is possible that books treated so vilely in the library itself will be better treated in a private house? I am not going to tell any tales, but this I may say, that before I became a Curator I have seen Bodleian books (once a very rare book) in strange places, and under circumstances by no means conducive to their preservation. The thing must be so: it is as much as the most vigilant officer can do to prevent damage being done under his very eyes, and it stands to reason that no mercy will be shown a book as soon as it is fairly out of the building. Again, when a man borrows a book from the Bodleian, you have not the least assurance that he will not in his turn lend it. This I know has happened with one book at least belonging to another library in Oxford. Sir Walter Scott had, perhaps, as much conscience as it is possible for a literary man to have, yet he lends Southey a book borrowed from the Advocates' Library (see above, p. 49) contrary to rule; and what Scott would do, Scott's inferior in character and morals would most certainly not scruple to do. When a book is lent out to any one on the borrowers' list no contract is entered into, either verbally or in writing, that the book shall be returned at any specified time, nor in fact that it shall ever be returned at all. Are the Curators quite sure that they have any legal power to compel a return under such circumstances? Unless a book is carefully collated when it is returned, it will always be impossible to say with truth that it has been returned intact; and if every book is to be collated on its restoration to the library, we shall have no small increase of work, and increase of work always means, as we well know, increased expense. The lending of books to private houses then involves the very probable, and in many cases the absolutely certain, damage of the book, and its possible total loss without the least remedy, and without the slightest recompense or penalty. A manuscript was lent to the late Professor ----, and it is hardly necessary to say that it has never been returned, and this is, I fancy, at least the second instance within a very few years of total loss, for which neither the public nor the University ever received one atom of benefit.