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Avery: Histoi-y of the United States 657 in regard to the Toscanelli correspondence. On the other hand, he retells the egg story, which he characterizes (I. 257) as "a sufficiently inane story . . . ; but there is enough character in this little feat, ponderous, deliberate, pompous, ostentatious, and at bottom a trick and deceitful quibble, to make it accord with the grandiloquent public manner of Columbus, and to make it easily believable of one who chose to show himself in his speech and writings so much more meanly and preten- tiously than he showed himself in the true acts and business of his life." The rejection of the incident of the egg story (first attributed to Columbus by Benzoni, a literary compiler, a half-century later, and told of Brunelleschi and his dome a half-century before the voyage of Columbus) is a sufficiently established result of criticism to have saved Mr. Young his reflections on it. In many cases the historically-minded student will be irritated by Mr. Young's flippant and journalistic com- ments on subjects of importance like the Demarcation Bulls. Mr. Young devotes a page to " the work called Libro de las Profccias, or Book of the Prophecies, in which he wrote down such considerations as occurred to him in his stupor. . . . The manuscript of this work is in existence, although no human being has ever ventured to reprint the whole of it" (II. 145-146). It is reprinted in the Raccolfa Colom- biana, and is not at all what Mr. Young describes it to be, but mainly a collection of scripture texts supposed to relate to the recovery of Jerusalem and the end of the world. Mr. Young scornfully reproduces one of the calculations in this work, no better or no worse than would be found in any orthodox commentary on Daniel or the Apocalypse down to within a generation, and then exclaims in his favorite Car- lylese : " Good Heavens ! in what an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk — a veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage to flounder himself, no human hand can pull him." In conclusion, the most serious deficiency in Mr. Young's work is not its occasional errors, but its great lack of the true historical spirit of interpretation. It is the work of a clear and versatile writer, but not of a historical scholar. It will amuse and interest the general reader and not seriously mislead him as to the career of Columbus, but from it he will gain little instruction in historical interpretation. E. G. B. A History of the United States and its People from their Earliest. Reeords to the Present Time. By Elroy McKendree Avery. In fifteen volumes. Volume II. (Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Company. 1905. Pp. xxxvi, 458.) In this second installment of the series which, according to the an- nouncement on the title-page, is to be extended from twelve volumes to fifteen. Dr. Avery describes the projection of French, English, Dutch, and Swede on to the Atlantic seaboard, and the vicissitudes befalling them after arrival, from 1600 to 1660 approximately. Obedient to the