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104 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January archaeologist. Thanks to the amount of attention which has been paid to it in France, Germany, and this country during the past twenty-five years, it has become the most easily datable object in Roman excavations. A sure chronology has been established for it. It dates the commence- ment of the occupation of a site as certainly as coins fix its termination, and is probably more reliable than coins in determining what may be called the internal chronology of a settlement. And this is due to the close study of names, forms, and ornament. We give a Dechelette number to ' the laughing loves ' around the base of Rabbi Ben Ezra's cup ; we observe around its rim ' skull-things in order grim ', and classify it as Dragendorff, form 37, recognizing it at once, despite the inadequacy of the poet's description, as a typical decorated pot of the Antonine period. The extent of the recent literature of terra sigillata can be gauged from the very useful bibliography appended to Messrs. Oswald and Pryce's work. But (except in outline by Dragendorfi) Samian pottery has never before come under general treatment. Dechelette's monumental Vases ceramiques ornes de la Gaule Romaine disregards plain ware as well as the products of the German, or as they are here called the East Gaulish, factories. The latter are still imperfectly known to English students. Although the important pottery centre of Rheinzabern has been fully investigated by Ludowici, there is as yet no German equivalent to Dechelette, and the scattered memoirs of Knorr and other workers in the same field are not readily accessible. Messrs. Oswald and Pryce have consequently done great service in producing a book which characterizes the potteries of eastern, as well as those of central and southern Gaul, and which embraces plain as well as decorated forms. Arretine ware and its precursors are properly excluded from their work except so far as is necessary for the study of provincial ware. Investigation into terra sigillata may be said to have proceeded from potters' names to pottery forms, from forms to ornament, and, in the department of ornament, from figure types to decorative motifs. One of the features of the present work is its comparative neglect of figure designs and the attention paid to varieties of purely decorative ornament. Take, for instance, an ornament apparently so monotonous and uniform as the ovolo or ' egg and tongue ' pattern — Browning's ' skull things in order grim ' : plate xxx shows 126 typical varieties. It is precisely this subordinate detail which may yet prove the surest clue in assigning sherds to their respective factories and periods. The study of terra sigillata is advancing so rapidly, our acquaintance with the history of the manufacture is becoming so intimate, that the construction of a historical dictionary of Roman potters is merely a matter of time. The germ of such a work is to be found in our authors' fourth chapter. Readers can expand that chapter* for themselves out of other parts of the volume by help of the full index of potters' names at p. 280. It is, in fact, only by digging into the book and by continual reference to its 85 plates that one comes to appreciate the mass of detail which it contains. Only so may one grasp its utility in furthering the study of a subject to which it merely professes to serve as introduction. H. H. E. Craster.