November 27, 1902] 



NA TURE 



75 



note supposed to be translated into Arabic as " Allah 

 kebir" ; but this (which in any case would be ordinarily 

 phrased "Allah hu akbar," "God is most great") 

 means " God is great," and the phrase to which 

 John of Wiirzburg is alluding is Allah al-'dli, UJ| ^\ 



" God the Exalted," one of the hundred beautiful names 

 of God. In a review of the first part of Mr. Beazley's 

 work which appeared in these columns five years ago (vol. 

 lv. p. 555), comment was made on the curious manner 

 in which the author often spelt oriental, and especially 

 Arab, names ; in the present volume he seems to have 

 taken the hint then given him, and does his best to 

 avoid Gallic misspellings of the "Jesus Jabus " or 

 " Doul-Karnain " type, but we still find such an unscientific 

 transliteration as " Shaykh " (p. 239) for shekh, and such 

 a distinct mistake as " Magreb " (p. 264) for Mdghrib ; 

 the word is spelt with the guttural GVzain, not with a 

 trim. Most English writers will spell Semitic names 

 correctly enough, but will go irretrievably wrong over a 

 Russian or Polish appellation ; Mr. Beazley, however, 

 apparently finds Arabic or Syriac words difficult, while 

 his spelling of Slav names is always unimpeachably 

 correct. 



In fact, when he returns to subjects with which he is 

 thoroughly familiar, we find Mr. Beazley as valuable and 

 as interesting as before, e.g. in the section of chapter vii. 

 which deals with the geographical work of Adam of 

 Bremen, who, as a clerk at the court of the great Arch- 

 bishop Adalbert (d. 1076), was in the best possible 

 position for gathering in the varied lore of the seafarers 

 of the North for use in a geographical treatise. Of this 

 lucky position he made the best possible use, and the 

 result is that his tract " On the Position of Denmark 

 and of Other Regions beyond Denmark'' is of prime 

 importance in the history of geography. 



The appendix on maps is hardly so good as it might 

 have been. Mr. Beazley praises the Mosaic Map of 

 Madaba very highly (p. 580), but to us it hardly seems to 

 merit such praise ; it suffers in the first place from being 

 executed in mosaic, and can hardly be taken to give us a 

 very good idea of what the maps of the old Imperial 

 period were like. On the same page Mr. Beazley says 

 that in this map "we have one of the oldest pictures yet 

 discovered of Jerusalem (outside the Egyptian and 

 Assyrian monuments)." This passage has puzzled us 

 considerably, for there is no representation of Jerusalem 

 upon any Egyptian monument whatever, not even one 

 of the time of Sheshenk I. (Shishak), and the Assyrian 

 bas-relief of a town with a name ending in . . . alammu, 

 which exists in the British Museum, cannot be identified 

 with Jerusalem with any confidence. Perhaps Mr. Beazley 

 is thinking of the reliefs representing Sennacherib's siege 

 of Lachish. In his next edition the misleading phrase 

 between brackets should be deleted. Mr. Beazley does 

 not give many references to modern experts in antique 

 cartography ; as in the former volume, no mention 

 is made of the name of the late Mr. Coote, for example. 

 In the review of the first volume it was stated that 

 " the revision of the whole of chapter vi. [of vol. i.], on 

 ' Geographical Theory,' together with Mr. Beazley's ac- 

 count of the history and use of mediaeval maps for the 

 whole book— although Mr. Beazley omits to state the 

 NO. 1726, VOL. 67] 



fact — is due, we understand, to Mr. C. H. Coote, of the 

 Map Department of the British Museum." 



Air. Beazley seems to have odd ideas as to the function 

 of a footnote ; he often uses it to convey some little piece 

 of further information which could perfectly well have 

 been inserted in the main text, e.g. on p. 130 we read 

 that of the Crusade of Siegfried Archbishop of Mainz, 

 out of " seven thousand only two ' returned " ; on referring 

 to note 1 we find the laconic addition "thousand." 

 There are other instances in the book of the same 

 peculiarity. 



Finally, we must, as before, protest against the insufficient 

 indices with which Mr. Beazley provides his successive 

 volumes. No doubt he will give us a proper index to the 

 whole work when it is completed, but meanwhile we have 

 nothing but a " short index of names," which is of little 

 use. It would have been a better plan to have provided 

 a full index for each volume. 



Generally speaking, then, the chief fault we have to 

 find with Mr. Beazley is his manifest unfamiliarity with 

 Eastern matters, which sometimes causes him to make 

 serious mistakes when dealing with the oriental side of 

 his subject. For all else he is excellent, and, moreover, 

 he has written a most interesting book. 



SOIL AND SANITATION. 

 The Earth in Relation to the Preservation and Destruc- 

 tion of Contagia, being the Milroy Lectures delivered 

 at the Royal College of Physicians in 1 899, together 

 with other Papers on Sanitation. By George Vivian 

 Poore, M.D. (Lond.), F.R.C.P. Pp.257. (London: 

 Longmans, Green and Co., 1902.) 



THIS book is the work of an enthusiast, but to find 

 fault with enthusiasm in these days of rapid pro- 

 gress and fresh discoveries would be unwise. Mr. Rider 

 Haggard, with his watchword " Back to the Land," and 

 Sir Seymour Haden, with his advocacy of " superficial and 

 coffinless burial," are both enthusiasts. Who will venture 

 to say that Mr. Rider Haggard or Sir Seymour Haden 

 or Dr. Vivian Poore are idle dreamers ? None dare say 

 this, and if in some directions the writer of this review 

 ventures to dissent from Dr. Poore's conclusions, it must 

 be understood that he does so in a spirit of tolerant 

 sympathy with the author's main contentions. 



In the first six chapters, the distinguished author seeks 

 to show that such diseases as tetanus, anthrax, diarrhoea, 

 dysentery, cholera, Malta lever, malaria and enteric fever 

 have not been proved to be "soil diseases " in the proper 

 sense of the term. That is, that the prominent part 

 assigned to soil in the spread of disease among human 

 beings is largely speculative in character. At the same 

 time, the author freely admits that contaminated soil may 

 occasionally (accidentally, as it were) be the means of 

 causing isolated attacks or even localised outbreaks of 

 certain diseases. Nevertheless, he refuses to regard the 

 soil as a "breeding ground" for pathogenic microbes or 

 as capable of exerting any sustained power of spreading 

 disease. On the contrary, he considers the soil effective 

 in bringing about the dissolution of harmful germs. 



Chapter vii. deals with the Maidstone epidemic, and is 

 an intelligent, but not wholly unbiassed, criticism of the 



