mSCRIPTIONES BRITANNIjE LATINyE. 157 



to the reputation of the Editor. As it is, however, it is an excellent 

 specimen of what conscientious and painstaking labour can effect ; 

 and we cannot refrain from expressing our regret that the credit 

 of collecting and elucidating the Epigraphic remains of the Roman 

 period in Britain is not due to a native of the island. Neither 

 learning, nor wealth, nor patriotism, nor other requisites, one would 

 suppose, were wanting in Great Britain ; and yet the honour of 

 initiating and accomplishing a great work for the illustration of a 

 very im.portant part of the national antiquities of England and 

 Scotland must be given, in the first place, to the encouragement and 

 patronage of the Prussian Academy of Letters, and in the second, to 

 the industry and self-denial of a German scholar. It is with some 

 satisfaction, however, that we are able to add, that if Berlin is 

 entitled to the credit of issuing the first collection of all the Latin 

 inscriptions found in Britain, Toronto may justly claim the merit of 

 having anticipated even the mother couiitry'^'' in the production of a 

 work exclusively devoted to Britanno-Eoman Epigraphy, and in the 

 first publication of a volume in which some of the chief difficulties of 

 such records of the Boman occupation of the island are critically 

 treated. 



* We gladly beav testimony to the remarkable interest in the collection and 

 elucidation of national antiquities, as evinced by the many Archffiological 

 Societies established throughout the kingdom, and the numerous articles on such 

 subjects contributed to Journals or Transactions. And yet, so far as we have been 

 able to ascertain, it is an undeniable fact that no separate work on general Latia 

 Epigraphy has been published in any part of the British Empire since Fleetwood's 

 Sylloge in 1691. Nor can we call to mind any scholarly publication even on 

 branches of it except the little books — Wordsworth's Pompeian Inscriptions and 

 Kenrick's Roman Sepulchral Inscriptions ; and both of these are of late date in 

 the present century, a century, — not to speak of the preceding hundred years — 

 which, on the continent of Europe, has enriched Classical and Christian 

 Archaeology by the learned labours of such scholars as Borghesi, De Rossi, 

 Cardinali, Garrucci, and Henzenin Italy, Orelli in Switzerland, Momnisen, lliibner 

 Arneth, Zumpt, and Zell in Germany, and Egger, Renier and Le Blant in 

 France, 



