464 REVIEWS OF BOOKS July ductions to satisfy the needs of modern research. Nor has it been super- seded by any modern work. To be sure, a number of excellent facsimiles of Visigothic manuscripts have in recent years appeared in different publications, yet up to the present time the student who wished to get his bearings in the field of Visigothic palaeography had only one resource, and that was the collection of Ewald and Loewe. This work, however, did not aim at presenting a treatise on Visigothic writing — its palaeo- graphic judgements, in fact, are not infrequently at fault — and the student was still left in the dark on such important matters as the history of the script, its abbreviations, its method of punctuation, and so on. This lack has been largely supplied by the work of Professor Clark. A friend of Ludwig Traube, and familiar with his methods of research, the author was well fitted to do the work as it should be done. That he has not given us the exhaustive treatise he was capable of must be ascribed to the circumstances under which his task had to be performed. Although he very modestly expresses the wish that others more conversant with these researches may do what he left undone, it is to be hoped that he himself may in due season treat those phases of the subject which are not discussed in the present work, such as the origin of Visigothic writing, the struggle between Visigothic and ordinary minuscule in Spain, the use of Visigothic in France and Italy, the type of uncial and half-uncial that preceded the Visigothic, and the promised chapter on the history of Spanish punctuation. Dr. Clark's book opens with an historical sketch of the literature relating to Spanish palaeography. It is interesting to note that the first facsimile of a manuscript in Visigothic writing appeared in a work pub- lished in Rome in 1606, 1 and that Mabillon, the father of palaeography, gave no facsimile of the script in his De Re Diplomatica, published in 1681. The foundations of Visigothic palaeography were laid by P. Merino in his work, Escuela Paleographica, which appeared in Madrid in 1780. It is astonishing, adds Dr. Clark, how little advance has been made in the subject in the subsequent one hundred and twenty-five years. It is not till the last quarter of the nineteenth century that works appear that mark a distinct step forward. Delisle's Melange de Paleographie et de Bibliographie appeared in 1880. The next year was published the only manual on the subject »in the Spanish language. 2 At the same time, foreign scholars began to investigate the literary treasures of Spain. The gigantic work of fifty-one volumes, Espana Sagrada, begun by Florez (1747-72) and continued after him, was to be sure a perfect mine of information for the past history of Spain. But the scholarship of the nineteenth century was characterized by a passion for sources. A series of ' Voyages litteraires ' was undertaken. The first work by a foreigner to appear after Villanueva's Viage Literario (1803-52) is Valentinelli's Belle Biblioteche della Spagna. 3 This is followed by Ewald's ' Reise nach Spanien im Winter 1878 auf 1879 '. 4 What Reifferscheid did for Italian libraries Loewe and Hartel 1 B. Aldrete, Del Origen y Principio de la Lengua Castellana. 2 Munoz y Bivero, Paleografia Visigoda, Madrid, 1881. 3 Published in 1860 by the Vienna Academy. 4 In Neues Archiv fur altere deutsche Geschichtskunde, vi. (1881), 217-398.
