While we were that year reading the chronicle of Pellican there fell to us another discovery as startling. The old scholar, in narrating his youth, tells how he was spurred to the study of Hebrew by reading the Scrutinium Scripturarum of the Spanish convertite, Paul of Burgos. Reminded thus of our own copy of that work, I laid it before the class, remarking as I did so that it was old enough to be Pellican's own, having been printed by Scheffer at Mainz in the very year of his birth (1478). Led by this suggestion we looked to see what the book could tell us of its own story. From the opening fly-leaves we learned only that it had once belonged to William Henry Black-the eminent English antiquary who long was pastor of that little London congregation of Seventh-Day Baptists of which Sir Walter Besant makes such interesting use in the novel which fruited in the People's Palace-and that he had bought it, in 1849, at the sale of the library of Henry Francis Lyte, the hymn-writer; but, on turning to the end of the book, there stared at us from beneath the colophon, in a hand of not far from the year 1500, not indeed the name of Pellican himself, but that of his fellow-humanist and Rhineland neighbor, "Theodoricus Gresemundus Junior LL.D.” A notable man in his day was young Dietrich Gresemund of Mainz, poet, jurist, antiquary, the pride of his old teacher Wimpheling, who tried to make his epic on the desecrated cross a classic for the schools. But not even Wimpheling, who, when in 1512 death snatched off his darling in early prime, poured out his soul in glowing eulogy, has told us just when this prodigy was born; and modern guessers have gone by several years asunder. Our old book does better; for, turning the leaf, we found, in the same handwriting, the inscription: "Et ego Theodoricus Gresemundt filius natus fui anno salutis 1476 in vigilia Sancti Martini hora nona ante prandium". And beneath this, in what looked like a half-completed horoscope, were the words: "Figura nativitatis, die solis qu[a]e fuit 10 Novembris 1476, hora 9. m. 10. ante meridiem quae fuit principium hor[a]e Mercurii ". On Sunday, November 10, 1476, at ten minutes after nine in the morning-surely that is quite definite enough. But "Dietrich Gresemund the Younger" implies a Dietrich Gresemund the Elder. Our Dietrich's father, a great physician of those days, was indeed, like his son, a man worth knowing; but of his early years all that is told is that he came from a little Westphalian village near the town of Soest, and at his birth-year nobody seems to have guessed. Again our old book helps. In an older hand, above the lines recording his son's birth, we read: "Item anno domini Mo etc. xlvii in die Arnolfi uff eynem mytwochen strometur Soist per exercitum Theodorici archiepiscopi Coloniensis". It was perhaps the earliest event he

Marginal notes and memoranda by Pellican, the Gresemunds, Matthias Held. From old books in the library of Cornell University.

could remember, this storming of Soest; for the next line reads: “Item fui natus anno domini etc. xlmo in profesto trium regum❞— "I was born in the year 1440 on the day before Three Kings' day" (i. e., on January 5).15

Sorry gleaning this may all seem to those who know the yet unpublished wealth of Old-World libraries; but it at least suggests the guarding of our bescribbled margins and fly-leaves against the binder's renovating zeal. A single line may prove a priceless clue. At the top of the title-page of our copy of the little Spongia by which Erasmus sought to wash away the aspersions of Hutten (1523) is the autograph of its earliest owner: "Matthias Heros philosophiae professor, 1523". Can this be other than Matthias Held, later the great Vice-Chancellor of Charles the Fifth, of whom the biographical dictionaries can tell us nothing prior to his advent as a jurist, in 1527, at the supreme imperial court in Spires ?16

GEORGE L. BURR.

15 How large the share of father as well as son in the German revival of learning, has lately been shown by Bauch, the foremost living student of that movement, in his study on humanism at Mainz (1907), and Löffler in editing (1908) the long unpublished work of Hamelmann on the illustrious men of Westphalia has thrown fresh light on their origin and their activities; but neither could give with exactness the dates of their birth.

10 Facsimiles of annotations from each of the volumes described above are given in a second plate, with some hope that they may help in the identification of other annotations by these scholars.

THE LITERATURE OF THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, II.

NEXT in general interest to narratives compiled by those who have taken personally an active part in a campaign, and not inferior professionally, are the official reports of military attachés whose duty it has been to follow in the field the fortunes of the contending armies. The linguistic limits of this review confine our notice of this type of authorities to two groups, the narratives and observations of American and British officers. The former were published to the world by the General Staff of the United States Army in 1906-1907. The British War Office placed the reports of British officers at the disposal of the general public two years later.1

Both these sets of reports cover much the same ground, representatives from the American and British armies having joined the contending forces almost simultaneously. Collectively, they present a mine of accurate information to the historian and professional student. The criticisms recorded cannot of course be accepted as final, having necessarily been written on somewhat imperfect information; yet however much the horizon may have been obscured by the smoke of battle, observations jotted down while the pungent odor of gunpowder is still in the nostrils are primary evidence not to be lightly set on one side.

It would be as invidious as it is unnecessary to weigh these official reports one against another, but it is not too much to say that to the British officers at any rate both sets have proved a great help in their professional studies. The steady progress made during the last five years in the training of British troops owes very much both to the compilers of these volumes and to the Japanese and Russian authorities who gave generous facilities for their compilation.

With the volumes issued by the British War Office it is not proposed to deal in detail, but it may be permitted to express the

1

1 Reports of Military Observers attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, parts I., II., III., IV., V. (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1906, 1907); Reports from British Officers attached to the Japanese and Russian Forces in the Field, in three volumes with two cases of maps (London, printed for His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1908); Medical and Sanitary Reports from Officers attached to Japanese and Russian Forces in the Field (printed as above, 1908).