of Die Hochzeit von Figaro was given at the Kroll Opera, and students from the University of Halle repeated for the benefit of the congress scenes from the recently discovered comedies of Menander. An afternoon and evening were given to an excursion to Potsdam and Wannsee, and after the close of the congress many members accepted an invitation to visit Hamburg as guests of the city. Besides the festal occasions of a more general and official character, time was left free for smaller receptions and for the more intimate hospitality of many of the university professors. Especial praise should be given to the excellent arrangements which were made for the reception and entertainment of the ladies in attendance upon the congress, for whom a special local committee had prepared an elaborate series of excursions and visits to places and institutions of special feminine interest.

As at Rome, the congress was divided into eight sections, each being in charge of a Berlin professor. These were: I. Oriental history, Professor Sachau; II. History of Greece and Rome, Professor Eduard Meyer ; III. Political history of the Middle Ages and modern times, Professor Dietrich Schäfer; IV. Medieval and modern kulturgeschichte, Professor Roethe, with a sub-section on the history of the natural sciences under the charge of Professor von Buschka ; V. Legal and economic history, Professor Gierke ; VI. Church history, Professor Harnack; VII. Archaeology, divided into an ancient group under Professor Kekulé von Stradonitz and a medieval and modern group under Professor Wölfflin: VIII. Auxiliary sciences, Professor Tangl. In some respects this arrangement was an improvement on the grouping of the eight sections of the Roman congress, but the history of geography received less attention than at Rome, and the thinness, at times, of the programme in church history showed the unfortunate result of thus narrowing a field which at Rome included the history of religions and of philosophy. The subordination of economic to legal history was likewise regrettable. Overlappings were inevitable under any arrangement, and so were the conflicts of hours which prevented even the most rigid specialist from hearing all the papers which particularly interested him. At the sessions of the several sections, which either singly or in occasional joint meetings of two, occupied the morning hours, three papers were ordinarily read. Each paper was expected to lead to a discussion, but as the half-hour assigned to the reader was nearly always considerably stretched, the discussion was often of necessity omitted. At 12.30 each day the congress met in general session to listen to addresses of more general interest chosen from the various sections.

It is quite out of the question to attempt an analysis or even an enumeration of the principal papers read during the six days' meetings, and a few general impressions must suffice. The range of topics treated was remarkable, not only for the extent of time and space covered, but also for the catholic inclusion of the most varied aspects of historical study. Few, for example, will deny that the history of natural science is a subject of great importance to historical students, not only as a significant chapter in the history of ideas but as exerting a profound influence upon the material conditions of human existence : yet it is not usual for historical congresses to have a daily session in this field, nor is it often that a speaker can bring forward material of such freshness as the newly found writings of Archimedes described by their discoverer, Professor Heiberg, of Copenhagen. Again, the history of literature has been so largely studied apart from other phases of history that both historians and students of literature need more of such addresses as that of Professor Rajna of Florence on history and popular epic, or that of Professor Alexander Bugge of Christiania on the origin and credibility of the Icelandic sagas. From still another side a great chapter of human history lay behind the brilliant analysis given by Professor Cumont of Ghent of the development and spread of that astrological religion which constituted the last great phase of ancient paganism. Repeated illustrations appeared of the services being rendered by archaeological research to the advancement of historical knowledge. That seemingly inexhaustible repository of historical material, the monuments and papyri of Egypt, naturally occupied the first place, and Vessrs. Maspero and Grenfell were there to tell of them ; but new light was thrown on other dark corners by the excavations, described by Professor von Stern of Odessa, which reveal the strength and persistence of classical traditions in the Greek cities north of the Black Sea, and by the chapter from Sir William Ramsay's lifelong studies of the monuments of Asia Minor in which he traced social and ecclesiastical conditions in Lycaonia from the flourishing period of the fourth century to the decay which the deadening influence of the orthodox church brought about long before the Turkish conquest. An admirable example of the synthetic use of the new information derived from inscriptions and papyri was the address in which Professor Rostowzew of St. Petersburg examined the origins of an institution of far-reaching importance and, until recently, of great obscurity, the Roman colonate, and showed its derivation from the social and agrarian conditions of Egypt and Syria in Hellenistic and still earlier times.

The instances just given illustrate the general tendency of the papers toward the less-worked fields of history. In the Greek and Roman section, apart from three papers which showed the perennial interest of scholars in the origins of Rome, nearly all of the communications dealt with the Hellenistic and later Roman periods, and there was a singular absence of themes connected with the narrative sources. Most of the medieval contributions dealt with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though a fragment discovered at the Vatican by Professor Conrat of Amsterdam showed that new matter may occasionally be found in so well-worked a field as that of Frankish institutions. In treating the political history of modern times, on the other hand—the series of topics in economic and legal history took a wide range-nearly all of the speakers limited themselves to the history of Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and in all of the sections there was a notable absence of anything relating to the history of America and the Far East or to colonial matters in general. The papers on German history were remarkably good, that of Professor Marcks of Hamburg on Bismarck's student days and that of Professor Busch of Tübingen on Bismarck and the origin of the North German Confederation being in particular among the most successful of the whole congress. The importance of a little used source for recent history was emphasized by Professor Spann of Strassburg, who made a plea for the preservation and utilization of newspapers in Germany in some such fashion as has long been usual in the principal American libraries.

Controversial topics were generally avoided, or if treated, they were handled in an objective fashion, as in Professor Finke's notable summary of conditions in Germany antecedent to the Reformation. The impartial collection of the materials for German ecclesiastical history was proposed by the director of the Prussian Historical Institute at Rome, Dr. Kehr, and Professor Brackmann of Marburg in a plan for a monumental Germania Sacra which should comprehend the history of German dioceses, cathedrals and monasteries from the earliest times. A touch of temperament was given to one session by Professor Merkle of Würzburg, the well-known exponent of modernism, in a spirited discussion of the attitude of the Catholic Church and its historians toward the religious Aufklärung of the eighteenth century in south Germany.

The international character of the congress was excellently exemplified by a number of papers which dealt with international relations, using that term in its broadest sense and not limiting it to the

diplomatic and military contact of states. Thus the well-known master of diplomatics, Professor Bresslau of Strassburg, treated in a most suggestive manner an interesting phase of internationalism as seen in the form and style of official documents in the Middle Ages, showing the widespread influence of the chanceries of the popes, the German emperors and the Anglo-Saxon kings. Professor Schybergson of Helsingfors described the relations of the Göttingen historians to those of Finland and Sweden in the later eighteenth century. Professor Pirenne of Ghent gave an admirable analysis of the forces which produced the Burgundian state out of portions of France and Germany, and showed how the Burgundian dukes solved the problem of creating a central government which later served as a model for Austria. Comparative studies on closely related themes were those of Dr. Kaser of Vienna, tracing the emergence of the modern forms of government in the German territories in the fifteenth century; of Professor Rachfahl of Giessen, dealing with problems in the comparative history of assemblies of estates; of Professor Pélissier of Montpellier on the Italian signorie; and of Professor Sieveking of Zürich on the development of capitalism in the Italian cities. The history of law also furnished problems of international interest, as in Professor l'inogradoff's discussion of the influence of ideas of reason and equity in the English jurisprudence of the sixteenth century, and in the study of the Germanic element in Spanish law made by Professor Hinojosa y Naveros of Madrid. A still broader subject was suggested by Prince Teano in describing the plan of his great work on Islam.

The United States was represented on the general programme by Ambassador Hill, whose paper on “ The Ethical Function of the Historian " had the place of honor at the opening session. Vr. Hill, who gave added pleasure to his audience by speaking in German, discussed particularly the characteristic differences between the methods of history, which seeks qualitative knowledge, and the quantitative processes of the exact sciences. In the Oriental section the American speakers were Professor Reisner of Harvard, director of the excavations of the Egyptian government at Assouan, who described the royal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty, and Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, who presented some novel views on the early history of Galilee. Dr. Carter, Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, proposed in the second section a new explanation of the legend of Romulus and Remus, and in the section on medieval and modern history Professor Haskins of Harvard discussed, especially from the point of view of English constitutional development, the institutions of Normandy under William the Conqueror. Professor Kuno Francke described the international aims and purpose of the Germanic Museum of Harvard University, and in the section of ecclesiastical history Professor McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary presented certain " Prolegomena to the History of Protestant Thought". Other Americans registered at the congress were Professors Boas and Hirth of Columbia, Richardson of Yale, Lanman and Münsterberg of Harvard, Freund of Chicago, Fish, of Wisconsin, Sterrett of Cornell, Jessen of Bryn Mawr, and Klaeber of Minnesota, Drs. Robinson and Valentiner of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Mr. Leland of the Carnegie Institution.

The problem of organization and entertainment for such a congress as that of Berlin presents, to compare greater things with smaller, some of the same difficulties which are encountered in the more frequent and more local meetings of the American Historical Association and related bodies, and one who knows something of the embarrassment of American committees may be pardoned a certain satisfaction in observing that, in spite of daily revision, the printed programme of the congress never succeeded in predicting accurately what was to appear the next day, so numerous were the transfers and defections at the last moment. As regards the substance of the programme, allowance must of course be made for the wider range and more varied affiliations of an international body, but one could wish that American scholarship were accomplishing more in such fields as ancient history and that our students were more prone to extend their interests beyond the merely political and economic. Some of the papers at Berlin were dry and some were thin, but as a whole they represented a distinctly higher level than is reached in most of our American meetings. The subjects were usually larger and were treated with more complete mastery, as regards both substance and presentation. Each speaker averaged twice the time allotted normally at the meetings of the American Historical Association, vet the interest rarely flagged, a result due in large measure to the German habit of speaking rather than reading on such occasions; and the discussion, when there was discussion, was trenchant without being ill-tempered. That these qualities are not reserved for international occasions in Germany is evident to one at all familiar with the proceedings of the biennial Historikertage. The dominant impression of the congress was a deepened appreciation of the comprehensiveness and the vitality of