next two or three years, while a start has been made, on a small scale, in the Fiji Islands, where the valleys of the wet districts seem very suitable.

NEW BOOKS.

EUROPE.

Highways and Byways of Wiltshire. By EDWARD HUTTON. With Illustrations, by NELLY ERICHSEN. London: Macmillan and Co., 1917. Price 6s.

This volume of the excellent "Highways and Byways" Series will appeal more to the ecclesiologist and historian than to the lover of nature and the open country, who will find in the pages of A. C. Bradley, Hudson, and Richard Jeffries a fuller appreciation of the natural features-the grey, rolling downs, green valleys, and clear, troutful chalk-streams that give to Wiltshire its peculiar charm and its individuality among the southern counties of England.

But Mr. Hutton has described with loving care the many interesting preReformation churches and other ecclesiastical buildings of the county, and the 437 pages of this volume, packed with details of church architecture and history, will prove a mine of wealth to the student of such matters.

Stonehenge is now generally accepted as dating from late Neolithic times, and as having to do with the worship of the sun. The author, however, dismisses the conclusions of Sir Norman Lockyer and Mr. Gowland, together with all other theories, as incapable of any demonstration: Stonehenge remains for him a mystery -"its age uncertain and its purpose inscrutable." He regards old Sarum, the Roman Sorbiodunum, as the common centre of Wiltshire history and civilisation, and gives a most interesting account of the translation of the city to New Sarum, and of the rise of the great Cathedral from the "fair meads" at the junction of the rivers Avon, Nadder, and Bourne. Of the "fair and shining city of Salisbury," the beautiful close, and the glorious fourteenth-century spire that crowns the work of Bishop Poore and Elias de Dereham, he writes with appreciative charm. Not many Wiltshiremen will, however, endorse his opinion that the edifice, from its perfect symmetry and uniformity, is lacking in interest, and were it not for the majestic and unifying beauty of the triumphant spire, the Cathedral would be so dull as to be disappointing."

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Passing to Amesbury, in the valley of the upper Avon, once the most peaceful and remote of country villages, but now the centre of camps of armed men, he quotes from the Arthurian legend the beautiful account of the death of Queen Guinevere, and the carrying of her body from the convent at Amesbury by the repentant Launcelot for burial in King Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury. A full description is given of Marlborough Castle and its successor the Castle Inn, the most noted hostelry on the road between Bath and London. Here the great Chatham "lay" for several weeks, putting all the grooms, waiters and stable-boys into the livery of his house during his stay. The great school which has grown up round the old red-brick building of the Castle Inn the author, however, dismisses in a few lines.

Many pages are devoted to the fine churches and abbeys of North Wiltshire, where he laments the ruined glories at Malmesbury and Lacock-Malmesbury Abbey founded in the eighth century, but many times destroyed and rebuiltthe present building dating from 1142-and Lacock, whose first abbess was the

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Countess Ela, widow of William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, who lies in the Cathedral, in "one of the noblest thirteenth-century tombs in the world." The beautiful little town of Bradford-on-Avon, on the extreme north-western margin of the county- "a place really unique in England, and so full of visible antiquity as to enchant and astonish us"-is famous for its so-called Saxon church, one of the earliest stone churches ever erected in these islands, and believed to be not later than the tenth century. The author, however, will not accept so early a date, and considers it to be the work of Norman hands.

Mr. Hutton is a chronicler of the past rather than of the present, and it is evident that his sympathies are wholly with pre-Reformation times" before the revolution which filled England with ruins." Yet is this a notable book, and the erudition of the author, together with the charm and distinction of his style, lift it far above the level of the ordinary descriptive guide-books that fill our shelves.

The volume is illustrated by a number of pleasing, but occasionally somewhat weak, line-drawings by Miss Nelly Erichsen.

The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans. By R. W. SETON-WATSON, D.Litt., Lecturer on East European History in King's College. London: Constable and Co., Ltd. Price 10s. 6d. net.

In spite of all that has been said and written, and of the later knowledge that has come to us as an outcome of the war, it has to be acknowledged that the Balkan Peninsula and its peoples still remain more or less of a sealed book to the public in this country. An explanation of this may, perhaps, be found in the difficulties of language and place-names, and in the obstacles to travel which have been created by the unsettled conditions which prevailed even before the present great European upheaval. Mr. Seton-Watson has made the affairs of the Near East his particular study, and in the present volume he sketches in outline the history of the growth of the Balkan States from the earliest times at which any trustworthy record is available up to the present time. The subject is of necessity a wide and complex one, and the author has been obliged to compress severely in order to bring it within the compass of the first part of his book. How much this is so may be estimated from the fact that his bibliography includes the titles of some two hundred to three hundred volumes in many languages-but chiefly in German-dealing with the origin and history of the Balkan peoples, their endless feuds and struggles, and their emergence as separate autonomous states from the rule or misrule of their Turkish masters. It is no disrespect to Mr. SetonWatson's book, which is evidently the fruit of wide and laborious study, combined with the knowledge which only a specialist like himself can bring to bear, to say that had he been able to devote more space to this portion of his subject his book might have gained in clearness. As it is, we confess to a feeling of bewilderment caused by the multiplicity of scenes, and of the actors who crowd the unfamiliar stage.

Mr. Watson points out that of all the nations of the peninsula the first among whom national sentiment revived and took a practical form was the Serbian, "nor can it be emphasised too strongly that the movement among the Serbs was spontaneous, that its success was due in the main to their heroism and endurance, and that they received far less external help than any of their neighbours. But it is well to note at the very outset two peculiar features of Serbian history. Not merely have the frontiers of the Serbian state changed more frequently in the course of the last thousand years than perhaps those of any other European state but they have never included, and do not even to-day include, the whole of the

..

race; indeed, the fact that they do not is one of the causes of the present war." This, of course, refers to the numbers of Serbs and Croats who inhabit the Banat of Austria-Hungary in the region immediately to the north of the Danube, and whose ambition it is that this part should eventually be freed from the dominance of their secular enemies the Magyars, and become a part of their own country.

With reference to the relations between Serbia and Bulgaria, the following is worth quoting: "It is well to remember that the two nations are to-day in very much the same stage of development as England and Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In that period, and even much later--as the result of the fatal policy of the first of England's "lawyer statesmen," Edward 1. -the fierce, mutual hatred of the two neighbours could hardly be exaggerated. And yet their eventual union was absolutely inevitable; though we, who are wise after the event, must be careful not to reproach our ancestors unduly for their national blindness. The same principle applies to the rival branches of the Southern Slavs, who have no real future unless they agree among themselves. Just as Scotland was too weak and poor ever to attain unaided to national greatness, but was always strong enough to hamper and endanger England's movements at every turn by an alliance with the French, so Serb and Bulgar, by their internecine warfare, have enabled alien powers to overwhelm, or in modern times to control, the destinies of the Balkan Peninsula."

In his chapter on Bulgaria under the Turkish yoke, Mr. Watson refers to the struggle which was required to restore the mother-tongue in Bulgaria to the place usurped by Greek. The Greek Church tried to root out everything Slavonic, and even in the nineteenth century made a practice of destroying the monuments and manuscripts of a historic past (cf. the act of the Greek Metropolitan of Trnovo in 1825, when he made a bonfire of the old library of the Bulgarian Patriarchate), a practice which must increase the difficulties of the historian. Mr. Watson remarks that "it is only fair to add that these habits of destruction and the kindred practice of forging historical documents or monuments have been adopted by every race in the peninsula at one time or another. Only the Turks were either too lazy or too contemptuous to indulge in such competition." It is worthy of note that it was only about 1835 that a Bulgarian version of the New Testament was printed in Bukarest, and that the effort to restore the mother-tongue in place of Greek belongs to the nineteenth century. Liturgy, schools, and clergy had been alike Greek, and it was possible for an unobservant traveller to go through Bulgaria so late as the forties of last century imagining that he had been amongst Greeks only. Mr. Watson brings this section of his book (Chapter VII.) down to the time of the massacres of 1876, which inspired Mr. Gladstone's philippic and his "bag and baggage" policy for getting rid of the Turk in Europe.

With reference to the question of Constantinople and the Straits, Mr. Watson remarks that the definite establishment of German control would at once convert the dream of a Berlin-Bagdad railway into the nost practical of realities. It has been truly said by a writer in this Magazine (November 1917, page 505) that if Antwerp is "a pistol pointed at the head of England," the Berlin-Bagdad railway in German hands is "a gun pointed at the heart of the British Empire."

The second part of Mr. Watson's book deals with the Balkan wars and the break-up of the league among the Balkan states, and it brings events up to July 1913. In a prefatory note he says that he has not been able to finish with his subject owing to his departure from London on military service. The book thus breaks off rather abruptly, and we are deprived of his views on the happenings of the present war. Those who had the privilege of listening to Mr. Watson's lecture on Rumania, which he delivered to the members of the Society in 1916, may be able to estimate what a loss this is, and we hope that he may be able to return to his subject. The book contains four excellent maps, and we recommend it to the notice of our readers as a mine of useful and valuable information.

La France de l'Est (Lorraine-Alsace). By V. VIDAL DE LA BLACHE. Paris: Armand Colin, 1917. Prix 10 fr.

The publication of La France de l'Est is of course prompted by the circumstances of the time; but the volume, as might be expected from the authorship, is one of permanent value, one to which geographers will turn long after the present war for information on all points of geographical interest, direct and indirect, in relation to a region which derives from its situation a peculiar degree of geographical importance. It is divided into five parts, respectively entitled "The Formation of La France de l'Est," "The Revolution and Social Conditions," "The Industrial Revolution," "Western and Central Europe," and "The Possibilities of the French Market." Now that the thoughts of all are turned to a large extent to what is to come after the war, it is possible that readers may feel inclined to consult the last three parts first. And there indeed they will find much of great interest both in respect of what is expressly stated and what is in various ways suggested. Still it may be doubted whether at the present time the first two parts do not contain matters of even greater interest, and, at any rate, we would advise even those readers who are most concerned with the near future not to pass them over, even though they carry us back to a remote past. It ought to be explained that under the general term "formation," as applied to La France de l'Est, is to be understood not merely the geographical structure but also the social organisation, and to some extent the political history-so much of the history as to enable us to understand how Lorraine that is the whole of Lorraine, both French and German-together with Alsace could come to be regarded as a unit. Some of its chapters are partly composed of geographical description characterised by all the lucidity and skill of presentation for which the author is well known, but others are on such subjects as the People of Lorraine, the Entry [of the region] into the French Unity, and the Old Régime. And it is in this last chapter that we find matter which is now probably as worthy of attention as anything else in the book, from the light it throws on the difference of the methods followed by the French and the Germans in dealing with annexed territories and the corresponding differences in the results. In more than one place we are shown how the economic life of the region was directed to Central Europe and the Low Countries. "Great interests," the author remarks, "were based upon those relations. The French administration thus found itself, first in Alsace, afterwards in Lorraine, face to face with a thorny problem. If, with the idea of effecting simplification and unity, it decided to incorporate those new provinces within the domain of the customs tariffs instituted in 1664. it cut short a fruitful régime, it ran the risk of drying up important sources of wealth. For Alsace in particular it would have been a grave matter to throw obstacles in the way of buying cattle and selling grain in Switzerland, or to hinder the access for the varied produce of its agriculture to the markets in Germany; and it was nevertheless clear that the maintenance of this régime was opposed to the economic attachment of the province to its new country! Should a remedy be sought in expedients and half-measures? That, no doubt, would have been the policy adopted by a bureaucracy acting at a distance according to its own methods away from the immediate control of the facts. The attitude of our Intendants was quite different: taking counsel from realities, they stood up resolutely for the privilege of the province" (pp. 54-5).

...

Elsewhere we are told (p. 187) in a passage referring to the large number of Germans present in Alsace, that this was no novelty. "Our Intendants of Alsace, as early as the end of the seventeenth century, noted the fact, and recommended that they should be treated with every consideration, in the interest of the commercial relations which that province, in effect foreign [d'étranger effectif], maintained with Germany." The result was that, in 1716, only thirty-five years after the violent seizure of Strasbourg, a governor of Alsace could speak of the magistrates and inhabitants of that city as very devoted (très affectionnés) to the service of the King (p. 48); that, at the time of the Revolution, when the development of manufactures in both provinces, and the fact of the Revolution had changed for the time the relative value of external markets, the region readily entered into full union with France, "a union slowly prepared and patiently ripened the fruit of reciprocal good-will" (p. 68); and that in 1791 crowds of volunteers, more than were demanded, both in Alsace and the adjoining departments of Lorraine, flocked to the republican standard (pp. 81-82), whereas the Pan-Germanist author Auerbach has found himself compelled to acknowledge with bitterness that "the Alsatian would feel himself lowered in becoming German" (p. 88)-a fact of which there is abundant evidence from other sources. The only illustrations in the volume are two maps, one showing the density of population in (German) Alsace-Lorraine and the adjoining French departments, and the other showing by cantons the increase and the diminution of population in the same area between 1871 and 1911, the method of indicating these changes serving to accentuate the diminution.

The Western Front at a Glance. New enlarged edition, with an Index. London: George Philip and Son, 1917. Price 1s. 3d. net.

This is a useful little atlas, corrected up to August 1, 1917. It contains an index map of the whole western front, another of the British front at the date given, and 48 plates, on a scale of two miles to the inch, illustrating not only the areas over which the front extended at the time stated, but, a useful feature, some adjacent areas in addition. The changes which took place on the front between July 1, 1916, and August 1, 1917, are indicated. Woods are shown in green, heights in metres, and roads, railways, and canals are separately indicated. So far as we have tested it the index seems good, for most of the names which have come into prominence in the fighting since its preparation are already included. The booklet is of a convenient size, being much more manageable than a folded

map.

ASIA.

Scènes de la Vie Révolutionnaire en Chine (1911-14). Par JEAN RODES. Troisième Edition. Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1917. Prix 3 fr. 50 c.

In the autumn of 1911 M. Rodes was in Constantinople, having left China some three months before. When the news of the revolution reached him he retraced his steps, returning vid the Trans-Siberian railway to Pekin. He was thus in the country during most of the period of storm, and was an eye-witness of many strange scenes. His book consists in part of vivid and picturesque descriptions of sundry visits made to Shanghai, Hankow, Canton, and Pekin during the progress of the revolution, and in part of sketches of personages and incidents connected with it, based upon information obtained locally. The book is one of great interest,