Holvies : Caesar s Conqticst of Gaul 1 1 5 testimonies of Kallisthenes, Eumenes, Chares, Nearchus, Aristobulos or Ptolemy Lagus. Occasionally, too, the rhetoric of Arrian is not taken with the proper grains of salt. But perhaps this tendency was natural and even inevitable in preparing a history of this scope and purpose. Barring the flippant touches here and there, already alluded to, the book is written with power and charm, and will help to dislodge from the popular mind many ideas of Alexander and of his career which have been fastened there by RoUin's History and Plutarch's Lives, even if it is not as corrective along this line as the severest historical critic might wish. In the main issue it is wholesomely corrective, inasmuch as it teaches that Alexander's work was not destructive, nor his career that of a mere mad conqueror. As a great sower he went forth over all the world to sow, but the soil of the world had first to be prepared for the sowing. In another respect President Wheeler's work is most helpful and in- structive. It keeps before the reader the modern political conditions, the modern geography, commerce, ' routes of travel, social states, and local or national ambitions which tax the statesmanship of our day in ad- ministering the incoherent fragments of what was once the world-empire of Alexander. Had Alexander penetrated further into India, and into China, and performed there too his work of sower, European civilization might not at this moment be confronted with so ghastly a problem. Caesar's Conquest of Gaul. By T. Rice Holmes. (London and New York: The Macmillan Co. 1899. Pp. xliv, 846.) "It is to be wished rather than hoped that the appalling mass of printed matter which, for four centuries, has been accumulating around the Commentaries, may not be swelled in the future by mere verbiage " (pp. xvii. f. ). An author who thus writes in the preface to a volume of nearly nine hundred large octavo pages devoted to the one hundred and ninety-three small Teubner pages of " the unpretending little book which Caesar wrote two thousand years ago in the scanty leisure of a busy life," must certainly be unconscious of the irony of his situation. But the book is fascinating, in spite of its undeniable verbiage and quite un- necessary bulk. And when the reader once becomes conscious of the magnitude of the task which the author has undertaken, and of the long years of patient, exhaustive labor which the performance of the task has cost, he will not cavil at discursiveness here and there, especially as the style is always agreeable, nor at what often seems superfluity of theme. The design of the book is to give an annotated English narrative of Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which shall be not only useful to teachers and interesting to general readers, but also worthy of the notice of scholars and students of the art of war. This might well have been done in pp. 1-162, the actual narrative, with the addition of pp. 607-807, the run- ning commentary, the latter judiciously enriched with some of the critical, ethnological, geographical, political, historical and military ma- terial which now bulks out into pp. 165-606. We should then have
