and Commas An extremely interesting and valuable little book. easily carried in the pocket, is "Rules for Compositor and Readers at the University Press, Oxford," by Horace Hart, M.aA., Printer to the University of Oxford. It states the practices which this famous Press has adopted in a great many of the difficulties and doubts and alternatives which present themselves to writers and_printers in the form of minutia. Originally, and indeed from 18% until to-day, this little book was not issued to the public, being intended only for compositors or correctors at tha Clarendon Press. But copies found their way into the hands of authors eager for its special guidance. Government officials and others, at heme and abroad, applied in increasing numbers for copies, and received them gratuitously. Then it was discovered that copies of th> booklet were on sale at one of the London stores, and from that moment it seemed "more than complainant to provide gratuitously what might be afterwards sold for profit.' Hence the present edition, the twenty-sixth, is issued to the public at the price of two shillings net.
A Wrarra or Inrorsatron, The rules laid down on a very great variety of points of spelling, division of words, punctuation, soy marks, the formation of plurals. in' words English and foreign, the use of hyphens, contractions and many others, do not primarily profess to be imperative rules: they represent the considered practice of the Oxford University Press—a much safer and, in the end, a more helpful kind of isstruction. The work, in its later editions, has had the advantage of revision by the late Sir J. A. H. Murray and Dr. Henry Bradley, joint editors of the "New English Dictionary."
To what words would you affix the termination "able," and to what the termination '"'ible''? This booklet tells you the Oxford practice. You are not bound to follow that practice in this or other matters. The alternative use of s or z in words like anglicise, particularise, satirist, equalise, subsidies, and many more, is a matter in which great differences of custom are found in writers and in print ers. The "Rules advise one to write each of the above words with az. This I never do, and am never likely to do—though printers' readers may take the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.