REVIEWS every detail at various periods. There has been no steady advance from where the Egyptians left off. On the contrary endless attempts have been made, beginning all over again from the outlook of the Memphite Drama. None of them seems to have been very successful.STANLEY CASSON CAT0 THE CENSOR ON FARMING. Translated by ERNEST BREHAUT. (Records of Civilization : Sources and Studies, vol. XVII). New York : Columbia University Press ; London : Oxford University Press, 1933. pp. XLVI, 156, with I plate and 6 line drawings. 18s 6d.The treatise De Agri Cultura of the elder Cat0 takes no high place as a work of literature, but it is a document of the very greatest importance for the economic history of Republican Rome. Written in the first half of the second century B.c., by one who was himself a farmer of the old school, as a practical guide for the gentleman-agriculturalist or his foreman, it represents the transition from the old Italian agriculture, devoted mainly to the production of cereals and based on a system of small holdings in the hands of free peasants, to the new order in which the vine and the olive were supplanting grain-crops and the peasant proprietors were giving place to absentee landlords, working large estates by slave labour. The style of the work is scrappy and disconnected and most of it is nothing more than rough notes, but in its way it provides a fairly complete calendar of the farmer's year, and at the same time gives valuable sidelights on other matters-on the building of the farm and its equipment, with special reference to oil-and wine-presses, on the supply of labour, partly by slaves, partly (at busy seasons) by freemen working under contract, on the condition of slaves, their management and feeding, on the old religion of rural Italy and its relation to agriculture, and on the primitive medicine which finds in cabbage a specific against all ills from gout to deafness.Mr Brehaut has carried out the work of translation well : if he has given his version rather more literary form than the original possesses that at any rate will make the English reader more comfortable. The text is supplemented by an ample series of scholarly footnotes, in which some of its difficulties and obscurities are cleared up and parallels are adduced from ancient authorities and modern practice and by a careful introduction, in which Mr Brehaut lays emphasis on the adaptation of the practice of the small peasant grain-farmer to the needs of the large-scale wine-and olive-farm worked by slave labour.The reader who desires an introduction to ancient agriculture can find nothing better than Cato's handbook as presented and interpreted by Mr Brehaut. It is a pity that the price is unreasonably high ; though the book is handsomely produced, the illustrations are neither numerous nor elaborate.C. J. FORDYCE.
ENQUIRIES INTO RELIGION AND CULTURE. B y CHRISTOPHER DAWSON.
London and N m York: Sheed &' Ward, 1933. pp. XI, 347. 8s 6d.This is a sheaf of essays on a wide range of subjects, unified by an Idealist and, in...