Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/926

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

9 1 6 Reviews of Books tially a reprint of the first edition. A few foot-notes have been added, and some of the old ones enlarged, but even in this matter the policy of the editor has been very conservative, as one can see by reading page loi, note I, or page 150, note 5. It was a great loss to scholars that Arnold did not live to revise his work in the way in which he probably would have wished to revise it. He could have given us a more adequate treatment of the provincial budget, of the administration of justice, of the army in the provinces, of the imperial cult, and of the importance of the concilia. More to be regretted still is the editor's failure to study the great system of Roman military roads, and to make such a resume of the work of the Limes commissions in Germany and Austria as Kornemann has lately drawn up (c/. Klio, VII. [1907], pp. 73-121) in his article on Die neucste Limesforschung im Lichte d. romisch-kaiserlichen Grenspolitik. The work in the main is thoroughly trustworthy, but the chapter on taxation needs careful revision. The patrimonium Caesaris and the res privata principis (pp. 208-209; p. 208, n. I ) should not be identified. The senate probably did not lose its control of the acrarii/vi Safiinii until well into the imperial period (p. 215). Egypt did not belong to the emperor's patrimonium (p. 128). In the opinion of the reviewer the uprisings in different parts of the Empire in the third century A. D., and the establishment here and there of independent or semi-independent governments do not find a sufficient explanation in the ambitious hopes of aspirants for the throne. Sec- tional, national, or racial tendencies must be taken into consideration. We do not yet know when the separation of civil and military functions in the provinces took place, but it was the result of a gradual develop- ment, which can probably be traced farther back than the reign of Aurelian (p. 172). The following slight errors may be noted: p. 47, read B. C. ip/' for B. C. lyp; p. 70, Roman for Rome; p. 78, effectively for effectually ; and p. 125, instrument against him for instrument against them. The forms Raetia, Dyrrachium, and Gains are preferable to those used in the text. Mr. Shuckburgh has prepared an index, a map, and a bibliography for the revised edition. Frank Frost Abbott. The Quest for a Lost Race. By Thomas E. Pickett, M.D., LL.D. [Filson Club Publication No. 22.] (Louisville, John P. Morton and Company, 1907, pp. xxiii, 229.) This work was first printed, in connec- tion with the Home-coming of Kentuckians at Louisville in 1906, in a leading Kentucky journal. It is reprinted now, as the twenty-second number of the Filson Club Publications, in a revised and expanded form. The paper centres about Du Chaillu's theory that the English-speaking people of today are of Scandinavian and Norman rather than of German origin. Dr.. Pickett is not indeed a strenuous advocate of this theory; the tenor of his work is rather that of a semi-serious discussion intended only to divert the reader. An appendix contains an alphabetical series of Norse, Norman, and Anglo-Norman names copied from ancient rec- ords in England.