Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/545

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Setlie : Scsostris 535 mitted to no critical examination ; old and new, good and bad, are lumped together. There are some serious omissions in the bibliography, but many good books do appear there, and it is only to be regretted that these do not take a more prominent place in the body of the book. The foot-notes which indicate (not always correctly), the authori- ties for statements in the text, betray an astonishing lack of critical per- ception on the part of the author. Apparently all books are to him equally trustworthy. A favorite authority for facts in any period of his- tory is Cantu, Storia Universale, Turin, 1857, a compilation which was not considered reliable at the time when it was written, though the standard for such books was much lower than it is to-day. Even old Rollin figures among the authorities in the notes, though his name is de- cently omitted from the bibliography to make place for the more im- posing Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Ammianus Marcellinus. For con- ditions in ancient Greece we are referred to The Wealth of Nations, for the causes of the decline of the Dutch East India Company to Miss Scidmore's Java; these are both of them excellent books, but they are hardly satisfactory for the purpose in hand. Good books are cited in the notes, but much oftener apparently than they were used by the author. Thus the name of Heyd's Geschichte des Levantcliandels, the great secondary authority for Italian settlements in the East, appears not infrequently in the section devoted to medieval colonization, but little use is made of the valuable material in the book, and the author quotes about as much of it indirectly from Adams's Civilization as he does from the original. There seems no need to discuss the contents of the book in detail, or to point out its errors in fact. The first part of Volume I., devoted to colonization in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, is especially poor. The modern period is better treated and as the history approaches the present day it constantly improves. In writing the history of recent events Mr. Morris shows a command of facts and a sense of proportion which are missing in the greater part of his work. It is a pity that he dissipated his energies over so broad a field. The book will probably be well received by the public, for its sub- ject is popular now and in general its style is agreeable, but it can make no claim to the attention of the student or the scholar. Clive Day. Scsostris. Von Kurt Sethe. [" Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Alterthumskunde Aegyptens," II. I.] (Leipzig: Hiniichs. 1900. Pp. 24.) Of all the puppets which have been made to dance upon the stage of Egyptian history in response to Greek imagination, the most remarkable is that of Scsostris. The readers of this journal are too familiar with the fabulous achievements attributed to him by Herodotus, Diodorus, and all the rest, to require even a reference to them here. The question of