} 
DECEMBER 3, 1896] 
NATURE 
99 
acquainted with much of the literature of Arabia, Persia, 
India, and Greece. While so engaged, whenever he 
came across a story or an anecdote that struck his fancy 
he made a note of it, and towards the end of his life the 
notes he had thus collected he classified, and from them 
he composed the book of laughable stories which is now 
rendered accessible to Western readers. A few of these 
stories have been previously published by Adler and 
Morales from a MS. in the Vatican, but the whole 
number, 727 in all, have now been published by Dr. 
Budge. The MS. in the author’s own possession, which 
he has used as the base of his text, was written by a 
scribe who omitted some of the stories that he con- 
‘sidered were not edifying ; but these gaps Dr. Budge has 
fortunately been able to supply from a MS. in the India 
Office, so that there is every reason to believe that we 
now havé the work in the exact form in which it left 
the hands of Bar-Hebraus. In the India Office MS., 
though the scribe did not go so far as to omit any of the 
stories, a note is frequently put in the margin as to what 
the reader is to skip and what to read; but, as Dr, 
Budge points out, the Western reader will probably 
doubt the wisdom of the man who made the selection. 
Dr. Budge himself has given us the book as Bar- 
Hebrzeus wrote it, though in his translation several of 
the stories, for obvious reasons, have been turned into 
Latin. \ 
From a scientific point of view this collection of 
stories is of the highest importance, for not only do 
‘they illustrate the differences exhibited by Eastern and 
Western ideas of wit and humour, but we also find 
among them many interesting variations and develop- 
ments of older traditions and beliefs. “Some of the 
stories,” Dr. Budge remarks in his introduction, “may 
-have existed in more than one form, or they may have 
been told in different ways. Thus in No. ccclxxx., the 
scarabzeus is made to say to its mother, “ Whithersoever 
I go men spit upon me,” and its mother replies, “It is 
because thy beauty and smell are pleasant.” With this 
may be compared the Arabic proverb, “The beetle is a 
beauty in the eyes of its mother.” Again, in No. ccclxxv. 
we have the story of the ape of the mosque and the dog, 
but the turn given to the story is quite different from 
that of the Arabic version. We may also notice, in pass- 
ing, that stories told of one man by one author are told 
of some one quite different by Bar-Hebrzeus. Thus in 
No. iv. it is said that Socrates once saw a woman who 
had hanged herself, and that he remarked, ‘“ Would that 
all trees bore such fruit as this; but in Diogenes 
Laertius the saying is attributed to Diogenes the 
Cynic. .. .” Dr. Budge has in this manner been able 
to indicate the sources from which several of the stories 
are derived, and to trace their subsequent development ; 
the great majority, however, are entirely new, and are 
not to be found in any other work at present published. 
It would be impossible within the limits of a review to 
do justice to the book even by lengthy quotations, but 
some idea of its scope and of the ground it covers may, 
perhaps, be obtained from a brief 7éswié of the contents 
of the twenty chapters or headings under which Bar- 
Hebreeus classified his stories. The first eight of these 
contain notable sayings by sages, philosophers, and 
various classes of men of different nations ; then follow 
NO. 1414, VOL. 55] 
stories of physicians and legends attributed to them, 
stories of the speech of animals, of men whose dreams 
and divinations have come true, stories of rich and 
generous men, of avaricious men and misers, of work- 
men who followed despised handicrafts, laughable stories 
of actors and comedians, stories of clowns and simpletons, 
of lunatics and of men possessed of devils, stories of 
robbers and thieves, of wonderful accidents and occur- 
rences, and finally a collection of physiognomical 
characteristics supposed to indicate a man’s character 
or future actions. The chapter or section of most 
interest to the present writer is that dealing with dreams 
and divination, for in these stories we see the survivals 
of a complicated system of divination and sorcery that 
flourished in Western Asia more than 2000 years before 
the birth of Bar-Hebrzeus; in so varied a collection, 
however, it is probable that each reader will find some- 
thing of interest for himself. In conclusion, we may add 
that Dr. Budge is to be congratulated on having opened 
up this rich field of study for all those who may be 
interested in ancient Oriental customs, legends, or 
beliefs. 
OUR BOOK SHELF. 
Biedermann’s Electro-physiology. Translated by Frances 
A. Welby. Vol. i. Pp. xii + 522. (London : Macmillan 
and Co., Ltd., 1896.) 
STUDENTS of physiology who find, as many do, their 
ignorance of German to be an embarrassing obstacle in 
their reading, ought to be grateful to Miss Welby for her 
skilful translation of Prof. Biedermann’s “ Electrophysi- 
ologie,” an account of which we gave some time ago to 
our readers. The value of the book consists chiefly in 
this—that it is a faithful record of the results yielded by 
the researches of the last half-century in the field of 
inquiry to which it relates. Some parts of this field are 
very unfamiliar to ordinary readers ; consequently the 
difficulty of the translator’s task has been considerably 
increased by the circumstance that many of the words 
used have as yet no recognised English equivalents. In 
such a case a choice has to be made between the method 
of introducing into an English book forms of expression 
| obviously German, and that of devising new terms, when- 
ever they are required for the exposition of new facts or 
new relations. Considering that the book is likely to be 
freely used as a source of information by the manufac- 
turers of text-books, who often have no leisure to read 
original papers, at the same time that they desire 
to be up to date, it is well for their sakes, and still 
more for the students for whose use the boiled-down 
product is destined, that Miss Welby has succeeded in 
selecting short, simple, and expressive words. What 
could be better, for example, than her translation of 
“ neberwerthig” and “ unterwerthig” by “ above par” and 
“below par,” or of “ abgelettete Stelle” by “lead off.” On 
the whole Miss Welby has given the sense of her author 
with great care and accuracy, and writes, whenever the 
responsibilities of translation allow it, in good style. But 
in thus commending her work, we do not wish it to be 
understood that there may not be here and there slips to 
be put right in the second edition—such, for example, as 
the rendering of the German word Cantile by Canula 
(sic) (p. 80), or of “graphische Darstellung” by graphic 
record” (p. 370), or, in the same paragraph, of “ Boussole 
mit moéglichst leichtem Magneten” by “ galvanometer 
with a very free magnet” ; but even such small errors 
as these are few and far between. 
