6 BRITISH MUSEUM 



connexion must be made of the Contemporary Art Society's annual 

 donation. A selection of the chief acquisitions follows : — 



Printed Books. 



Early printed books : Bonaventura, de instructione nouitiorum, 

 Montserrat 1499 ; and Die Tajel des Kersteliken Levens and Dat S2negel 

 des Kersten Geloefs, both printed by G. Leeu, Gouda 1478. Of English 

 sixteenth century books, unrecorded first editions of Peter Leuens, 

 A right profitable booke for all diseases, London 1582, and John Davis, 

 The Seamans Secrets, London 1595. A Prymer of Salisbury use, Paris, 

 1535, is apparently unique. 



Manuscripts. 



A twelfth century Suetonius, acquired at the Chester Beatty sale, and 

 a thirteenth century Chartulary of Aldborough, co. York, were the 

 chief medieval accessions. The Duke of Bedford presented nine 

 volumes of letters and papers of the Sheridan family, through the 

 Friends of the National Libraries, and that body presented the 

 holograph MS. of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography, besides com- 

 pleting the purchase of the Percy Collection papers mentioned in the 

 Return for last year. 



Oriental Printed Books and MSS. 



The chief acquisitions were a copj^ made in 1482 of the Persian poem 

 Dastur i ushshak by Fattahi, with two illuminations, presented by 

 Mr. R. S. Greenshields, and a fifteenth century Hebrew MS., being 

 Vol. I of a digest of Commentaries on the Talmud, by Zachariah ben 

 Judah al-Aghmati. 



Prints and Drawings. 



The National Art-Collections Fund presented an unknown landscape 

 drawing by Rembrandt, and a large Venetian woodcut, about 1500, 

 of the battle of Zonchio (1499). A fifteenth century German woodcut 

 of the Four Temperaments and the Four Elements w^as presented by 

 Mr. John Charrington ; and Mrs. Theodore Rosenheim presented the 

 collection of about 11,000 foreign book-plates made by Max Rosenheim. 

 The most important purchase was an unknown fifteenth century 

 Florentine engraving of the Descent from the Cross. In the Oriental 

 Sub-Department, the most important acquisition, five of a very rare 

 set of seventeenth century Chinese woodcuts of fruit and flowers, was 

 due to the National Art-Collections Fund. 



Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. 



The cliief purchases were a granite sphinx, the face a portrait of the 

 Nubian Tirhakah, from excavations at Kawa in the Sudan ; and two 

 inscribed bronze daggers and a bowl with relief decoration from 

 Luristan. Of donations may be mentioned : from Mr. Brunton's 

 expedition to the Badari district a fine stone seated figure of the fifth 

 Dynasty; and from the Hyde-Campbell Thompson expedition to 

 Nineveh, an inscribed stone cylinder of Shamshi-Adad I. 



Greek and Roman Antiquities. 



Twelve surgical and other implements, from the Louis Sambon 

 Collection, were presented by Dr. Davies Sherborn ; and a jug of red 

 polished Cypriote ware, about 2500 B.C., by Mrs. H. S. Lauriston Scott. 



