sixty pages, the Hippodrome thirty-nine, previously published as a separate paper, and the long circuit of churches has each its careful summary. Throughout, the attitude and atmosphere is that of the American visitor and the local archeologist. The past is always seen in the light of our raw Western present, and every object is hallowed by that nameless charm dear to all who have known some old city well and felt for it "as a lover or a child." The happy result is that Mr. Grosvenor dowers the reader with his own entranced interest. His volumes are a most competent topographical companion and guide-book, to which one may unhesitatingly refer the student and reader, for whom Byzantine annals, in whatever shape presented, have hitherto lacked a local interest and an intelligent topography. For general and popular use, Mr. Grosvenor's work gains greatly from his point of view. This has, however, led him to omit all references to authorities, to blend what might have been with what is known to have been, and now and then to accept as proven what the local antiquarian believes to be true. These instances are few, attach to minor monuments, and weigh but little by the side of the very large additions our author has made to the knowledge of the Byzantine city by his personal investigation and discovery (as in the old imperial entrance to Sancta, or in several inscriptions), and still more by his sedulous collation of Byzantine historians, the publications of local archæologists, and the sites themselves.

No one writing in English has attempted this arduous task before as a whole, and no one who approaches Stamboul by any of the many paths that lead to its gates but is in Mr. Grosvenor's deep debt. Invaluable as he is, however, in all the local relations of his subject, he scarcely grasps the broad currents of empire and of trade which have guided the rise and fall of the city which for nearly three thousand years has sat on the Golden Horn. Founded as an incident of Greek trade in the Euxine, Byzantium waxed great in the centuries when Phoenician galleys and Persian rule closed the routes to the East by the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. When Alexandrine conquest, the Ptolemies, and Rome opened these routes, Byzantium, with other cities on the Black Sea and on the Bactrian traderoutes of the interior, declined. When the Arab expansion closed the southern route in the fourth and fifth centuries, culminating in the seventh, Constantinople again flourished as the old land-routes were reopened. When Turk and Tatar closed both northern and southern land and sea routes, the eastern Mediterranean sank into the eclipse of trade just ended by the Suez Canal. Greater value might have been given to the numerous and most accurate accounts of edifices, had a more comparative treatment been adopted. For a clear comprehension of the relation which the buildings he describes bear to the great stream of architecture East and West, the reader must look elsewhere than to Mr. Grosvenor's pages. His account of the rise of the Turkish Empire follows fabulous tradition without comment. His eulogy of Abdul Hamid has awakened some severe ex post facto criticism; but it is fair to remember that, prior to the massacres of 1896, all our author says would have been echoed by nineteen out of

twenty European or American residents of Turkey competent to judge. In presswork and paper, the volumes are a little overdone, with an eye to the Christmas market instead of the historical student. The illustrations are ample, admirable when from photographs, and in other cases usually well selected. The transliteration of Turkish and Arabic names and words, in general, follows French models; but it is far from satisfactory and by no means uniform. The second edition, which the work deserves, should have a list of Byzantine emperors and of Othmanli Sultans, and maps of the region and of the city at different periods. TALCOTT WILLIAMS.

The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. By HASTINGS RASHDALL, M.A., Fellow and Lecturer of Hertford College, Oxford. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. New York: Macmillan and Co. 1895. Two vols. in three, pp. xxvii, 562; xiv, 832.) IT has long been known that Mr. Rashdall was engaged in a careful study of early university history, and it is several years since the present book was first announced. The glimpses of his methods and conclusions, which he has occasionally allowed the public in his communications to periodicals like the Academy, have led us to expect a very high quality of work, and have made us disposed to grumble at the long delay in the appearance of the book.

It has been the more impatiently awaited because we have had no satisfactory history of the medieval universities in English. Laurie's little book on the Rise of the Universities, beginning as it does with the beginning of our knowledge of classical education and coming down to the Renaissance, could not supply the place even if it were more accurate and critical than it is. The account of the general university movement in the first volume of Mullinger's History of the University of Cambridge is more interesting reading than the present book, both because Mr. Rashdall's treatment is drier and his style sometimes a trifle ponderous, and because he gives proportionately less attention to the sides of university development which are more generally interesting; but Mullinger wrote before the more careful investigations of the last twenty years had been undertaken, and therefore hardly comes into comparison with this book. Maxwell Lyte's History of the University of Oxford appeared nearly fifteen years later, and after Denifle's volume had been published, but the slight references which it makes to the general movement are so scattered and confused as to be very unsatisfactory. There is nothing else in English which even makes pretension to represent the present opinions of scholars, or which should be used by any one who is seeking information on the subject, unless he is making a study of the whole literature.

The only books with which Mr. Rashdall's may fairly be compared are Denifle's Die Entstehung der Universitäten des Mittelalters, and Kaufmann's Die Geschichte der Deutschen Universitäten, of each of which only the first volume has appeared, Kaufmann's volume being the introduction

to his special subject and dealing exclusively with the general history of the early European universities. The author seems to fear, from the pains he has taken in his introduction to make the exact amount of his dependence clear, that the reader will suppose him to have followed the lead of Denifle too closely and with too little originality. But no reader who makes any careful comparison of the two books will be led to such a conclusion. He is in very close agreement with Denifle on all main points, but his treatment of the same topics shows everywhere independence of investigation and of judgment which leads to differing conclusions on many matters of detail, and the selection of varying phases of a subject by the two authors for fulness of treatment makes the books supplement one another in a very effective and interesting manner. It is a matter for sincere congratulation that we have at last in English a history of the early universities which is worthy of the highest rank among the world's books on the subject.

On all the chief questions which have arisen in the controversies between Denifle and Kaufmann, and between Denifle and Fournier, the author supports Denifle, with occasional agreement with the opposite side on less important points. In the great controversy between Denifle and Kaufmann on the necessity of a papal or imperial bull for the foundation of a recognized studium generale, he holds strongly with the former, but it must be said with rather strained principles of interpretation. Certainly the tendency of the dicta in the note on page 13 of Vol. I. would be to render it beforehand impossible to collect any evidence in support of Kaufmann's contention. The result of a comparison of these authors is the conclusion that Mr. Rashdall stands fully on a level with Denifle in the thoroughness of his investigation of the material at his command and in careful and sound criticism. He has not had the opportunity, nor has he attempted, to rival him in the discovery of new evidence, and if his book is perhaps less interesting than Kaufmann's, it is in this respect superior to Denifle's. The period covered is about a century longer than Denifle's, and includes the first movements of the Renaissance age. It thus links on fairly well with Paulsen's Geschichte des Gelehrten Unterrichts, of which a new edition is just now appearing. The gap between them is the Renaissance age, which is covered in a summary way in both books, though more fully in Paulsen. It must be noticed also that Paulsen is much more truly, as its title indicates, a history of higher education than is the present book.

Mr. Rashdall's work is chiefly a constitutional history, that is, it is mainly a history of the institutions and institutional life of the universities. Even those chapters devoted to the university studies bear this prevailing character. They dwell most fully on the development of the system of degrees, the formation of a professorial body, and the division of hours and topics. This is clearly a matter of choice with the author, for the introductory chapter on the Renaissance of the twelfth century, and the chapters on the relation of the separate universities to the general history, prove that if the author had chosen to write the history of higher education

during this period, instead of the constitutional history of the universities, the work would have been done with equal success.

It is perhaps hardly fair to criticise a book of this kind for its choice of subjects for detailed treatment, but the especial interest which the American university world of to-day feels in the subject of the curriculum of studies the natural interest of a transitional and formative age- leads us at least to regret that an earlier age, transitional and formative in the same respects, is not forced to yield us whatever suggestion it may have to make. We should be glad to spare the brief sketches of the minor universities which make up the first part of the second volume, necessary as these are to a complete institutional history of the movement, if that space could have been given to a more full study of the changes in subject and method in university instruction. It may be added that the principle of classification is not evident by which the intellectual movement which leads to the formation of the university of Paris is treated as general introduction to the rise of universities, while the other side of this same movement, which leads to the university of Bologna, and which is earlier in date, is regarded as special introduction to that university only, though the author clearly recognizes that the source of the special interest in law was the same with that of the special interest in theology. The fact of the narrower influence of the university of Bologna in Europe hardly seems to justify this arrangement, since the question here is not one of results but of causes.

By far the largest space is given to the three "archetypal " universities, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, even Salerno and Cambridge are very summarily treated, and, though three hundred pages of Vol. II., published as a separate part, are devoted to the other universities, the twenty pages given to Montpellier and to Prague are the most allowed to any of the seventytwo universities included. Edinburgh, which in some respects is of especial interest to American students of university history, falls outside the period of the book.

Mr. Rashdall's most valuable contribution to university history is his theory with regard to the origin of the university of Oxford, which he first published in 1888 in the London Academy, and which is here reproduced with no essential modification. This is that Oxford had its origin as a university proper in a migration from the university of Paris which took place very close to the year 1167. The positive evidence in support of this theory which Mr. Rashdall has been able to collect is very slight. It consists of these two facts, that in that year foreign students, who would be chiefly English, were ordered to depart from Paris, and that, at about the same time, English clerks residing abroad were ordered home in consequence of the quarrel of Henry II. with Thomas Becket. These facts are combined with evidence to show that soon after this date there is a school at Oxford with the characteristic marks of a studium generale, while before that time, though we have some evidence of single teachers of reputation at Oxford, we can find none of a university proper. Taken alone, this can hardly be said to prove the case, and it rests for its acceptance upon the gen

eral fact, which Mr. Rashdall states here less strongly than in his Academy articles, that the early universities originated in one of two ways, either in connection with cathedral or collegiate churches, which is impossible at Oxford, or in a migration from some older university. If this is the rule, as it seems to be, then the evidence must be regarded as establishing the strong probability of the theory, but without this it can only be regarded as possible.

Incidental points of interest are numerous throughout the work. The non-religious origin and character of the universities is made evident. The general prevalence of the system of colleges through the whole of Europe is brought out more clearly than by Paulsen even, or by any previous writer, as well as the additional fact that it was the better instruction given which put the colleges in the place of the university at Oxford. It is amusing just now to find that Bologna was forced by the competition of other towns to pay its professors a regular salary, as had not been done before, in order to hold them. The antiquity of hazing and of college initiations is clearly proved, and ancient faculties evidently had some trouble with athletics; at least they applied the term "insolent game" to bat and ball and "indecent" to tennis, but the Yale student can plead a hoary antiquity, if he pleases, for his custom of playing with a soft ball within the college quadrangle.

Mr. Rashdall does not hesitate in passing to express his mind freely and with emphasis on current questions of university management, or upon the "vandalistic reforms" of the day. The closing section is a brief but very interesting passage upon the light which this period of university history throws upon the problems of the present. One sentence here deserves quotation. He says: "University institutions must undergo perpetual modification in the future as they have undergone perpetual modification in the past. But it is well in this, as in the wider fields of social, political, and religious organization, as far as possible to preserve historical continuity. We should avoid the wanton introduction of an historical solecism where an adhesion to ancient form and usage would be quite as easy, the wanton destruction of ancient institutions where a slight modification of them would serve as well, the wanton abandonment of ancient customs and traditions where they are neither harmful nor burdensome." The reading of the book leads, indeed, to a new confidence in the belief that the strength of any system of higher education is in the naturalness of its development and emphasizes the warning of experience against attempts to modify such a development artificially either by the transplanting of foreign institutions or by attempting to carry out educational theories which diverge too widely from the indigenous type. GEORGE B. ADAMS.

Geschichte Spaniens von den frühesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Von Dr. GUSTAV DIERCKS. (Berlin: Siegfried Cronbach. 1895. Two vols., pp. viii, 442; iv, 707.)

WITHIN the space of somewhat more than eleven hundred pages the author of these volumes has undertaken to present a compact account of