WJicclcr: Alexander the Great 113 self against the attractions of the local Baals and of splendid for- eign cults, growing out of its original crudeness into a substantially- monotheistic faith with a high moral standard — all this is clearly and for- cibly told by our author, who handles his vast mass of materials with great skill. Of necessity much that he says is common property, the generally received outcome of recent criticism. He has, however, fresh points of view, as, for example, in his treatment of Manasseh's introduc- tion of the Assyrian astral worship. This worship, he observes, came in as the fashion of the day (imitation of the cult of the suzerain power), but the very fact that the King assigned a place in Yahweh's temple to sun, moon and stars shows that these were looked on as vassals of the god of Israel, to whom, therefore, Manasseh was not untrue. And im- mediately on Manasseh followed the Deuteronomic law (Dt. xii.-xxvi.) which is bitter against foreign customs. Dr. Budde calls attention, on the other hand, to the ease with which the people slid into foreign ways of worship — witness the na'ive speech of the Jerusalem women to Jere- miah (Jer. xliv. isff.). He thinks, also, that some of the stories in Gen. i.-xi. were adopted at this time from the Assyrians — a view less popular now than formerly, many scholars holding that the Genesis myths came to Israel through the Canaanites from the Babylonians. Dr. Budde's work mav be commended as eminently trustworthy and interesting. C. H. Toy. AlcxaJidcr the Great ; The Merging of East and West in Universal History. By Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the Univer- sity of California. [" Heroes of the Nations " Series.] (New York and London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1900. Pp. xv, 520.) The greater part of this book is already known to many in the twelve copiously and strikingly illustrated articles on Alexander the Great which appeared in the Century Magazine, Vols. LVII. and LVIII., November 1898 to October 1899 inclusive. The last nine of these articles reappear in book form with text substantially unchanged, pp. 227-501. To the first three extensive additions have been made, and some slight changes in the text which is common to magazine and book. Chapters V.-VIII. (pp. 81-148), entitled in order "The Old Greece, 336 B. C"; "Old Greece — Its Political Organizations, 336 B. C. ;" "The Political Ideas if of the Fourth Century, 404-338 B. C.;" are almost entirely new. Pp. 35-63, on the education of Alexander, are a welcome expansion of what occupies little more than a single page of the magazine. Perhaps a dozen pages of new material have also been inserted here and there in the first and third papers of the magazine, supplementing the information first given about the Macedonian and Persian peoples, their countries, political and religious principles. None of this new matter reads like addenda to the original articles, but as though it had been once excised from the work to adapt it better for popular presentation in the pages of a monthly magazine. It is generally such material as the scholar and the historian, VOL. VI. — 8.
