Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/393

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Minor A^oticcs 383 history and government. With its bibliographies, maps, and pictures, the work is pedagogically admirable ; in brief, it is probably as teachable as anything Mr. Myers has written. Unfortunately, however, we have a different story to tell of its accu- racy. Probably no other elementary history of Rome in existence is so thoroughly untrustworthy from beginning to end. A large class of the misconceptions and errors it contains are due to the author's ignorance of recent progress in the study of Roman history and to his inability to discriminate between good and poor authority. In his treatment of primitive Rome, for instance, he tries to follow Mommsen's History of Rome; but had he wished to learn Mommsen's later and more reasonable views, he should have read the Staatsrecht. For the earliest institutions of Rome, however, Eduard Meyer is far superior to Mommsen, while the soundest principles of criticism must now be learned from Herzog. But if the maker of a te.xt-book is to be excused from consulting such authorities, at least he might learn from Pelham that the Roman curiae contained plebeians and clients as well as patricians. The artificial and absolutely groundless theory that in the beginning the citizens were ex- clusively patrician distorts all the early history of Rome. Again, Mr. Myers fills the fifth century B. C. with agrarian agitation, whereas in fact the trouble over the disposition of acquired land could not have begun before the fourth century. From these instances it will be seen that the author's misconceptions involve not isolated points merely, but whole periods and long continued developments. Another large class of errors, due to sheer carelessness, might have been avoided by consulting the most ordinary text-book on the subject. Mr. Myers tells us, for example, that the comitium was a platform and the rostra a desk, that the Latin League was " re-established " in ^93 B. C, and that the Valerian-Horatian Laws, passed in 449 B. C, instituted the " military quaestorship ! " Blunders ecjually absurd occur on nearly every page ; on some pages the reader may search in vain for a correct state- ment. Considering how widely this text-book will probably be used, ought we not to pity the great number of boys and girls who will be taught to look upon such nonsense as Roman history ? G. W. B. Part XXVn. of Dr. R. L. Poole's Historical Atlas of Modern Europe (Clarendon Press) contains a map of Europe at the accession of Charles v., with letter-press by Mr. C. Oman, in which the rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and that of Charles is strongly emphasized ; one by the editor, of England and Wales, showing the parliamentary representation according to the Reform Act of 1832 ; and one by Miss Lina Eckenstein, of Italy from about 1060 to 1167. The atlas approaches its conclusion. Source-Book of English History, edited by Elizabeth Kimball Ken- dall, Associate Professor of History of Wellesley College. (Macmillan, pp. xxii, 483. ) Miss Kendall's book is intended for the use of boys and girls of about sixteen. It does not attempt to illustrate English his-