REVIEWS 405
Social, and Political Science ; Charlemagne Tower, Collection of American Colonial Laws; Catalogue of the Hopkins Railway Library ; Gross' Bib- liography of British Municipal History.
Numerous real or apparent oddities of classification appear. Wester- marck's History of Human Marriage under "sciences philosophiques" is an example.
Typographical errors and minor errors of fact are quite common ; e. g., Palsgrave for Palgrave, p. 114; Strikles for Strikes, p. 126; Baltimore, 1890, for Chicago, 1895, in date and place of publication of the American Journal of Sociology, p. 116.
The index which concludes the work is very full, occupying ninety pages. That is, it is full as to subject entries, but author and title entries are entirely wanting. What led the author to omit these is more than I can imagine. Petzholdt and Langlois have author entries in the index, and Vallee's main arrangement is by authors. All users of these books will, I am sure, agree that the ability to refer at once to a certain bibliography is very desirable. Granted that the book will be referred to nine times out of ten by subject, what is the harm of providing for the tenth time? Lack of space would be the natural excuse. But how can this be put forward consistently when the space that might have been used for author and title entries has been used for indexing names of places having printing establishments, which were already alphabetically arranged in one list and are of use only to specialists ?
The author, I claim, is guilty of another minor sin in neglecting to provide for a short symmetrical table of contents. He does, indeed, give us an outline of main divisions and subdivisions in the middle of the introduction, but many will never find it, and when found it is of not much use, for there are no page references.
It seems to me a great pity that M. Stein did not conclude to take all the space that was necessary to really bring Petzholdt down to date, to include all the bibliographies, full characterizations of them, and the valuable appendices as well. Two volumes would probably have sufficed, and few who really appreciate such work would have begrudged him three. For, after enumerating the serious faults in the work, I am in justice compelled to say that the work is today, for the bibliographer and reference librarian, the most valuable single-volume reference book in existence.
C. H. Hastings.
