120 



NATURE 



[Dec. 13, 1877 



in a cheap and handy shape. The work has been wisely 

 placed in the hands of those who have themselves been 

 pioneers in the task of discovery, and the reader has thus 

 been secured against the errors and unfounded conclu- 

 sions almost inseparable from second-hand informa- 

 tion. The histories of Egypt, Assyria, and Persia, have 

 now been followed up by those of Babylonia and Asia 

 Minor, and the fact that the history of Babylonia was the 

 last literary work which Mr. George Smith, the indefati- 

 gable Assyrian explorer, lived to accomplish, gives a 

 melancholy interest to it over and above that of its sub- 

 ject matter. Indeed, the materials for reconstructing 

 Babylonian history are still but scanty, and must remain 

 so until systematic excavations can be made among the 

 buried cities and libraries of anc ient Chaldea. With the 

 exception of a few early bricks and a fev/ dedicatory 

 inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, it is 

 from the clay tablets of Nineveh that almost all our 

 knowledge of the sister kingdom has been derived. Even 

 Babylonian chronology is still in an uncertain and tenta- 

 tive condition, and the fragments of the Babylonian his- 

 torian, Berosus, help us but little. Whole periods must 

 still be left blank, and though one or two dates, like the 

 conquest of the Elamite king, Cudur-nankhundi, in B c. 

 2280, can be fixed by the aid of later monuments, the 

 relative position of even whole dynasties has not yet been 

 settled. Our acquaintance with the mythical epoch is 

 quite as great as with the historical epoch ; the Assyrians 

 preferred the legends of the rival monarchy to a record 

 of its glories, and while, therefore, we now have in detail 

 the stories of the creation, of the flood, or of the hero 

 Izdubar, we know comparatively little of the political 

 changes which passed over the Babylonia of history. 

 Compared, however, with what we knew of them a few 

 years back, even this limited knowledge seems large and 

 accurate, and the best evidence of this is the volume 

 which Mr. Smith has written, and which would have been 

 an impossibility but a short time ago. Those who wish 

 to learn what light has been thrown by cuneiform disco- 

 very on this important section of ancient history cannot 

 do better than refer to his book. The importance of 

 Babylonia for the history of culture and civihsation is 

 daily becoming more manifest ; the early Accadian popu- 

 lation of ihe country, who spoke an agglutinative lan- 

 guage and invented wriiing, left a r ch inheritance of art, 

 science, mythology, and religious ideas to their Semitic 

 successors, and throug!i them to the Jews and Greeks. 

 The latter were influenced partly through the Pnoenicians, 

 partly through the nations of Asia Minor. Mr. Vaux's 

 volume on the Greek cities of Asia Minor is therelore a 

 suitable companion to Mr, Smith's " History of Babylo- 

 nia." His difficulty in compihng it must have been the 

 converse of Mr. Smith's, as here it was not the meagre- 

 ness but the superabundance of materials which was 

 likely to cause embarrassment. His selection, however, 

 is good and judicious, and the book he has produced is 

 at once instructive and readable. He has not forgotten 

 to invoke the assistance of the latest discoveries ; the 

 first few pages are devoted to an account of Dr. Schlie- 

 mann's life and discoveries, and the researches of New- 

 ton, Wood, and Fellows, have been largely drawn upon. 

 Considering the space at his command, Mr. Vaux must 

 be congratulated upon the amount he has been able to 



cram into it, and, so far as we can see, no city or fact of 

 importance has been omitted. Both volumes are appro- 

 priately illustrated, and the " History of Babylonia " con- 

 tains a copy of a bronze image of an ancient Chaldean 

 monarch recently brought to the British Museum, and 

 interesting on account of the rarity of such early monu- 

 ments. Their value is further increased by the addition 

 of indices, and the editor of Mr. Smith's volume has 

 added a chronological table of the Babylonian kings, and 

 an explanatory list of proper names. 



FRENCH POPULAR SCIENCE 



Musee Entomologiqice IllustrL Les Papillons : Organisa- 

 tion, Chasse, Classification. 80 Plates and 260 Wood- 

 cuts. Les Coleoptires : Organisation, Moeurs, Chasse, 

 Collections, Classification. 48 Plates and 335 Woodcuts. 



Anatofnie et Physiologie de VAbeille. Par Michael 

 Girdwoyn. 12 Lithographic Plates. 



Les Champignons. Par F. S. Cordier. 60 Chromolitho- 

 graphs and 8 Woodcuts. 



Les Prai7-ies Artificielles. Par Ed. Viaune. 127 

 Woodcuts. 



Les Ravageurs des Fortts et des Arbres d'Alignement, 

 Par H. De la Blanch^re. 162 Woodcuts. 



Les Ravageurs des Vergers et des Vignesj avec lUiC J^tudc 

 sur le Phylloxera. Par H. De la Blanch^re. 160 

 Woodcuts. 



Le Chaluineau. Analyses Qualitatives et Quantitaiivcs. 

 Guide Pratique. Traduction libre du Traitd de B. 

 Kerl. Par E. Jannettaz. 



Les Aliments. Determination Pratique de leurs Falsifi- 

 cations. Par A. Vogl. Traduction par Ad. Focillon. 

 160 Woodcuts. V (AH published by J. Rothschild, Rue 

 des Saints- Peres, Paris.) 



WE have received the preceding balch of works 

 from the house of Rothschild of Paris. This 

 is not the first time we have been able to show 

 not only how worthily M. Rothschild is maintaining 

 his position as one of the first publishers of popular 

 science works of the time, but how eagerly such 

 works are read, and how highly they are appreciated 

 in France. It is impossible to speak too highly of the 

 honest work which has been put into each of the volumes, 

 while many of them are written by men whose names are 

 widely known on this side the Channel. As is proper in 

 this style of literature, the text is equalled by the illustra- 

 tions. Why is it that in the matter of illustrated books 

 such as those before us, the French finished product is 

 so far superior to nine-tenths of those published on this 

 side the water? Nothing can exceed the perfection of 

 many of the hundreds of woodcuts in the above volumes, 

 while we have rarely seen more finished specimens of 

 chromolithography than those to be found in some of the 

 volumes. 



We cannot think that the French public is so far 

 beyond our own in its appreciation of science, as to 

 make the publication of similar works in our own coantry 

 hopeless. We shall therefore give an analysis of each of 

 the above works in a single article, with a view of showing 

 the treatment adopted abroad in popularising the branches 

 of science with which the volumes deal, 'nstead of devoting 



