Mr. H. Mattingly read a paper entitled "A. Vitellius Imp. Germanicus," in which he attempted to determine the reasons for the variations in Vitellius's obverse legends, between the forms Imp. Germ. and Germ. Imp. After distinguishing clearly the class of coins on which these titles appear, he brought evidence to show that the title Imp. Germanicus is characteristic of the non-Roman coins of Vitellius and of the early period of the reign before the victory over Otho. It implied a definite challenge thrown out by the German armies to the rest of the Empire, and in consequence when Vitellius became constitutional Emperor at Rome the title was deftly deprived of offence by inversion to Germanicus Imp., a normal form of title already borne by Claudius and Nero.
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
The forty-second annual meeting of the Library Association was notable, not by reason of its bibliographical or literary interest, for either was to seek, but as marking a definite cleavage between librarians and the Board of Education upon a matter of national importance. Were it not that education in this country has always been the province of the amateur, one might say that the cleavage was between amateur and professional opinion. The third interim report of the Adult Education Committee to the Ministry of Reconstruction proposed to hand over the control of the Public Library to the Local Education Authority; the Library Association, as a body possessed of a charter for the support and advancement of the public library movement, opposed the main recommendations of that report and returned to the Minister of Education a memorandum of counter argument. The four points of the memorandum were: (1) "That, with the already heavy responsibilities of the Education Authority, an additional duty—problems requiring detached consideration—will result in the convenient relegation of the library to a mere appendage of the school; (2) that, although co-operation between school and library does exist, the initiative has come almost wholly from the latter, and that assimilation by the comparatively untried and empirical "1918 model" education will be fatal to its general usefulness; (3) that the interest of the public is the main interest of the library, and that this is subordinated by the Adult Education Committee to the special interest of the school; (4) that the recommendations upon the provision of technical and commercial books were unduly extravagant and wasteful as regarding the first, but unduly parsimonious and wrongly conceived in the case of the second. To this document, beyond a bare acknowledgment, no reply has been given. Its form and tenor were unanimously approved by the Association at Southport.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The Bibliographical Society opens its 28th Session on November 17th, with a paper by Mr. R. F. Sharp, of the British Museum, on "Travesties of Shakespeare's Plays." The Society has not only kept up its normal output of books during the war, but has produced some volumes of exceptional importance, notably Mr. Gordon Duff's wonderfully complete record of English Fifteenth-Century Books, with facsimiles of all the types used in them; Mr. E. F. Bosanquet's illustrated Monograph on English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications; the first volume of Professor Carleton Brown's Register of Middle-English Religious Verse; and two exceptionally interesting volumes of Transactions. A Bibliography of Landor, by Mr. Stephen Wheeler and Mr. T. J. Wise, will shortly be issued, and the second volume of Professor Carleton Brown's Register should be ready early next year. The books of the Society are only printed for its own members, and until 1914 it was a close corporation, with an English and American membership limited to 300. In the January before the war it opened its ranks in order to obtain a hundred additional members and further increase its output. It is still open to book lovers to join at the old subscription of a guinea, but unless the Annual Meeting in January next decides otherwise, the roll of the Society is due to be closed on the third Monday of the new year. That the Society has done so well during the war is largely due to its genial President, Sir William Osler, who has held office longer than any of his predecessors and is soon further to help the Society by producing for it a Monograph on the Medical books published by the earliest printers, i.e. not later than 1480. Among the earlier presidents were Dr. Garnett and Mr. Fortescue, of the British Museum, the late Earl of Crawford, Mr. H. B. Wheatley, and Mr. A. H. Huth, owner of the splendid library which has already furnished material for eight sales at Sotheby's. Mr. A. W. Pollard, the present Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, has been its Hon. Secretary since 1893, and was given some years ago a notable partner in Mr. R. B. McKerrow, the Editor of Nashe.
THE FOLKLORE SOCIETY
During the war the Folklore, like other societies, has suffered by the absence of some of its most active members on service, but the work of the Society has not been interrupted, its meetings have been regularly held, many valuable contributions have been received, and the attendance has been well maintained. Folk-lore, the quarterly Proceedings, has retained its position as one of the leading authorities on popular beliefs and superstitions of races in the lower stage of culture. Its principal function is to publish papers read by members at the Society's meetings, and to review the more important literature on subjects in which it is interested. But it also welcomes from the general public notes and queries on British and foreign folklore and beliefs. The foundations have been laid for two important works which, it is hoped, will soon be ready for publication. As regards the folklore of these islands, the leading authority is the Observations on Popular Antiquities, by John Brand, subsequently edited by Sir H. Ellis. Large collections have been made under the supervision of Miss S. C. Burne, an ex-president of the society and author of a valuable book on the folklore of Shropshire, with a view to the compilation on the basis of Brand's work of a cyclopedia of British folklore. The second work now in progress is a general index to the long series of special books and Proceedings issued by the society since its foundation, the work of compilation having been entrusted to Mr. A. R. Wright.
THE SOCIETY OF PURE ENGLISH
The Society of Pure English, which was founded shortly before the war, and which during the war was temporarily suspended, has now begun to carry out its original purpose, and probably before this note appears its first two pamphlets will have been published. Pamphlet No. 1 will contain a list of the members of the Society and a reprint of the original prospectus, which was privately printed in 1913, and which contains a statement of the Society's aims in general terms. Pamphlet No. 2 will consist of a discussion by the Poet Laureate of a curious and hitherto almost unnoticed phenomenon of contemporary speech, the great increase, namely, of homophones, or words of the same sound but different meanings, in the English language. As the original prospectus shows, the Society does not in the least aim at the absurd project of "fixing" the language—its conception is rather that, since all living languages change and must change as life changes, an attempt should be made to guide this necessary process by acknowledged principles of tradition and taste.