The Development of Modern Europe: an Introduction to the Study of Current History. In two volumes. By JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, Professor of History in Columbia University, and CHARLES A. BEARD, Adjunct Professor of Politics in Columbia University. (Boston and London: Ginn and Company. 1907. Pp. xi, 362; vii, 448.)

THE keynote of these two volumes is struck in the preface. "It has been a common defect of our historical manuals that, however satisfactorily they have dealt with more or less remote periods, they have ordinarily failed to connect the past with the present. And teachers still pay a mysterious respect to the memory of Datis and Artaphernes which they deny to gentlemen in frock coats, like Gladstone and Gambetta. . . . In preparing the volume in hand, the writers have consistently subordinated the past to the present. It has been their ever-conscious aim to enable the reader to catch up with his own times; to read intelligently the foreign news in the morning paper; to know what was the attitude of Leo XIII. toward the social democrats even if he has forgotten that of Innocent III. toward the Albigenses."

Out of the mass of European history the authors have aimed to select without distortion those occurrences which project their influence forward into the future, and deserve attention because they help us to understand the world of to-day. To do this they have gone no further back in the narrative than the age of Louis XIV. He serves as a type of that absolute despotism which has been disappearing in Europe during the last hundred years and is not yet completely gone. The Peace of Utrecht, not that of Westphalia, is made the starting point of international relations, because its clauses, especially those in regard to the colonial world, are of so much general and permanent importance. The rise of Russia and of Prussia is briefly sketched, but the attention is centred chiefly upon the colonial struggle between France and England, the philosophers and the enlightened despots. A chapter on the Old Régime, with excursions back into the Middle Ages, attempts to give the background for the Revolution. But 1789 is not a sharp point of division, and the French Revolution is rather briefly treated. There is a "happy reunion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which should never have been put asunder by the date 1789. . . . It was the eighteenth century which set the problems of progress and suggested their solutions, leaving to its successor the comparatively simple task of working them out in detail" (preface). In the nineteenth century a nearly equal number of pages is given to England, France, Germany and Russia (about fifty pages each). Most manuals place nearly all the emphasis on events prior to 1870, but this one devotes as much space to an analysis of conditions subsequent to 1870 in each of these four countries as to the events from the fall of Napoleon I. to the FrancoPrussian War. In addition to this emphasis of the most recent period

there is a long chapter on the Expansion of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, and another on Some of the Great Problems of To-day which discusses sympathetically and sanely woman's suffrage, popular education, municipal ownership, socialism and many other things including the progress and effects of the great discoveries in the different branches of natural science. This enumeration will serve to show how the whole book converges upon the living world of the present moment. One might expect to find the treatment superficial where so many live topics are briefly touched upon, but such is not the impression left by this chapter; evidently the authors have had it in mind from the beginning and have been leading up to it in such a way that it seems a proper and natural closing chapter.

Far less space than is customary is given to purely military and political events and to the doings of kings and upper classes; though in an appendix the authors "atone for some seeming slights to royalty . . . by giving a convenient list of all the rulers down to December, 1907, whose names are likely to be met with" (II. 423). On the other hand, they tell clearly the fascinating story of the mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution, "discoveries destined to alter the habits, ideas, and prospects of the great mass of the people far more profoundly than all the edicts of the National Assembly and all the conquests of Napoleon taken together" (II. 30). They tell also with unusual fullness and sympathy of the rise to political power of the working classes; to socialism, for instance, in its various phases in the different countries, they devote about twice as many pages as to the Unification of Italy. They believe further that "it should be the aim of every student of modern history to follow the development of science and to observe the ways in which it is constantly changing our habits and our views of man, his origin and destiny" (II. 407). Accordingly at the close of the eighteenth century they show excellently how modern science was developing out of medieval superstitions about alchemy and astrology, and how the scientific discoveries helped develop the revolutionary spirit; at the opening of the twentieth century they touch upon the atomic theory, radium, anaesthetics, bacteriology, and the influence of the theory of evolution. To illustrate this generous treatment of economic matters, of the democracy, and of the advance of science, there are good portraits of Newton, Arkwright and Watt, of Karl Marx, and of Charles Darwin.

Errors in the text are very few. Mollwitz was not a brilliant victory" (I. 64), nor was it won "by the Prussian king", who in fact left the field believing himself defeated, nor did the infantry show "the results of all his father's care and discipline". The foot-note, page 134, seems to imply that Genoa, Venice and the German free cities were monarchies rather than republics. The impression ought not to be given that Francis Bacon had outgrown the old "confidence in vague words like moist' and 'dry'" (I. 164); for in his Natural History

(§ 758) one may read his own solemn statement that "generation ariseth from the nature of the creature, if it be hot, and moist, and sanguine. . . . Doves are the fullest of heat and moisture among birds, and therefore breed often. But deer are a dry melancholy creature." The Count of Provence was not Louis XVI.'s elder brother (I. 249, 257). The stories that "Bonaparte suggested occupying a certain promontory" at Toulon (I. 273, 286), and that at the time of the projected invasion of England "Robert Fulton offered to put his newly invented steamboat at Napoleon's disposal" (I. 316) have been relegated to the domain of legend. Prussia's humiliation at Olmütz did not occur in 1851 (II. 87), nor the proclamation of the German Empire on January 1, 1871 (II. 123). Read Austrian for Spanish Netherlands (I. 187), plebiscitum for plebescitum (II. 68), and Gandolfo for Gundolfo (II. 101). The black and white inset maps are good, but the color maps in preparation and execution are not at all up to the high standard of excellences of the text. Geographical names are frequently spelled two or three different ways, and the boundaries are not always accurately drawn; in the map of Europe after 1815 (I. 352), for instance, Nice is marked as part of France, and Luxemburg, the Bavarian Palatinate and some of HesseDarmstadt as part of Prussia.

The book raises large questions. Is it wise for the teacher of history to venture into fields beyond his own? Is it wise, in school or college, to neglect the "cultural value" of medieval history for the practical value of some correct notions about contemporary Europe? And granting these, are the authors wise in their omissions and in their selection of new points for emphasis? Lack of space forbids a discussion. But certainly this "adventurer in the educational world", as the authors humorously call it, is itself a strong argument in the affirmative. It is as solid and informing as it is interesting and clever. It may shock some conservative temperaments who have been living in blind faith in the recommendations of the Committee of Seven, but by many others we suspect it will be hailed as a new evangel.

SIDNEY B. FAY.

NOTES AND NEWS

GENERAL

Friedrich Paulsen, professor of philosophy and pedagogy in the University of Berlin and author of several excellent works on the history of German education, died on August 14 in his sixty-third year. His book on German Education, Past and Present, first published in German in 1906, has recently been translated into English by Dr. I. Lorenz.

Charles Bigg, Regius professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and author of The Christian Platonists of Alexandria (1886), Neoplatonism (1895) and Wayside Sketches in Ecclesiastical History, died on July 15, at the age of sixty-eight.

William Leete Stone, author of several historical works of value, died at Mount Vernon, New York, on June II at the age of seventy-three He began life as a lawyer but soon devoted himself mainly to writing. Among his works are: Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, The Campaign of General Burgoyne and St. Leger's Expedition, Life and Military Journals of Major-General Riedesel and a History of New York City.

Professor Macvane of Harvard will be absent from his teaching during the academic year now beginning, Professor Coolidge during the first half of the year, Professor Haskins during the second half. Dr. Oswald Redlich of Vienna is to lecture at the university for half a year, in political science.

Dr. Julian P. Bretz of the University of Chicago has been ap⚫ pointed assistant professor of American history in Cornell University. Professor William H. Allison of Franklin College goes to Bryn Mawr to have charge of the department of European history.

At the Johns Hopkins University Dr. Christopher Johnston has been promoted to the position of professor of Oriental history and archaeology.

Professor William E. Dodd will teach at the University of Chicago from October until next summer. During his year's leave of absence his place at Randolph-Macon College will be supplied by Dr. Charles H. Ambler, lately of the University of Wisconsin.

Professor S. C. Mitchell of Richmond College will teach at Brown University during the academic year now beginning. He has accepted the presidency of the University of South Carolina, where he begins duty in September, 1909.

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At the University of Kansas Dr. Carl L. Becker has been made professor of European history. Mr. D. L. Patterson, late of the University of Wisconsin, has become associate professor of ancient and medieval history.

Dr. Robert Carlton Clark has been appointed assistant professor of history in the University of Oregon.

For the annual meeting of the American Historical Association and American Political Science Association, to be held in Washington and Richmond, December 28-31, the passenger associations have consented to a round-trip rate to and from Washington of one and three-fifths the regular fare. A special rate from Washington to Richmond has also been offered, a special train, and special rates at the Hotel Jefferson, which will be headquarters and in which most meetings will be held. The conference on the mutual relations of geography and history will be devoted to a concrete instance, the relations between the geography of the Southern Atlantic states and their history; that on the teaching of history in the secondary schools will be chiefly occupied with a reconsideration of the Report of the Committee of Seven. The conference of state and local historical societies will consider, first, the report of its committee on co-operation; secondly, the relations of photography to archive-work; thirdly, it is hoped, the general subject of historical exhibitions. Among the papers to be read at Washington will be a group. by Mr. William Nelson, Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Talcott Williams and Mr. Melville E. Stone, on the relations of newspapers to historical investigation and writing.

When the July number of this periodical went to press it was confidently expected that the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1906 would be distributed by the first of July. Three separate and successive causes of delay have deferred the matter until the month of September, but it is presumed that before the appearance of this journal members who have paid dues for the fiscal year ending September 1, 1908, will have received their copies. Though much delay was experienced in assembling the material to be embraced in the Annual Report for 1907, and this process could not be completed until August, the text was then submitted to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In the first volume the largest item is Mr. W. S. Robertson's essay on Francisco de Miranda and the Revolutionizing of Spanish America. The second consists of the diplomatic correspondence of the republic of Texas with its representatives in the United States.

The International Historical Congress at Berlin, described in our first article, is also the subject of an article in the Athenaeum of August 22.

Volume XXIX. of the Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, covering the year 1906, has just appeared in two volumes (Berlin, Weidmann, pp. 373, 594; 379, 481). The issue contains surveys, of the usual type, for Egyptian, Hebrew, Persian, early Grecian and Roman history,