with, but such remains as the later Græco-Bactrian kingdom, so prolific of coins, must have left behind it. Further, the Kabul district, and the lower valley of the Kabul River, have for many years past been yielding coins of Hellenistic types, and evidence of native workmanship in bronze, stone, and terra-cotta, strongly influenced by Hellenic traditions. And numerous as are the similar remains found in the Græco-Buddhist topes of northwest India and the Yusufsai country, now to a great extent gathered into the Museum of Lahore, the Hellenoid' remains of Afghanistan, to judge from evidence obtained during British expeditions, seem to be still more numerous, and perhaps of more direct Hellenic pedigree.

At present we must stand before this jetsam of Greece in idle wonder. For while the Hellenic character in the early Buddhist sculpture is obvious to the most casual eye, it has undergone modifications which put it outside the ordinary archæological canons. Its immediate parentage and its date will be an insoluble enigma until the ground on which it is found shall have been examined with much greater minuteness than has yet been used. If we are to decide for Græco-Buddhist art whether it was a direct outcome of Hellenistic colonisation, or was not rather a Græco-Roman importation; whether it was the work of Greek artists, rather than of Indians who had been in the West, or of Indians who had accepted a western tradition filtered through Asia, we must know more about the small objects found in successive layers on the Buddhist sites, and especially the potsherds. There is, however, good hope that more light will be turned before very long upon this period in the history of west and west central Asia. The Indian Government, inspired by the scholarly sympathies of the present Viceroy, has appointed for the first time an Hellenic archæologist to the general directorate of the Archæological Survey; and there has been issued an international appeal for help towards the prosecution of excavation on the GræcoBuddhist sites of the north-west, a work to which the Indian Government promises its support.

But our Indian and home administrations might do more than this on occasion. It is one of the justest reproaches made against us in France, that in our Imperial expansion we do not sufficiently consider scientific inter

ests.

Military expeditions are sent from time to time into lands inaccessible to peaceful parties, but little thought is taken to attach to those expeditions men whose business it is to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge-easy and unobjectionable as such a course would be. Where war-correspondents are often an encumbrance, men of science, with their frequent linguistic capacity and habit of cultivating relations with native populations, might well be acceptable from the political point of view, while the services which they could render to knowledge are inestimable. Military expeditions are often enough made all but in vain. What have we to show, for example, for the occupation of Kabul and Kandahar? What shall we offer the world for overrunning Pechili? Over Channel 'they order this matter better. From a political point of view the first Napoleon's conquest of Egypt has been all undone; but the great survey, geographical, ethnological, and archæological, which his scientific attachés made in the valley of the Lower Nile, remains a lasting monument to the glory of France. It is long ago, and it was but for a year or two, that France occupied the Morea; but all later surveys of the peninsula have been built on the foundation she laid. We shall in all likelihood send armies often over the Indian frontiers, perhaps again into China, certainly to divers places in the centre of Africa. Must it depend on the chance sympathies and untrained eyes of engineer officers, with their hands full of military duties, or on the leisure of war-correspondents and commissariat contractors, whether the world shall have better knowledge of a dark place of the earth after the successful issue of an expedition than it had before? One does not hope for much. To support science, art, and letters in the grand style of the two Napoleons is utterly foreign to the tradition of bureaucracies. The last embers of that Imperial fire are now dying even in France. Administrative classes, whatever the sympathies of their individual members, have always been collectively Philistine; and effective official encouragement of letters, art, and science has depended on predominant individuals, usually monarchs. What the Napoleons did, in emulation of Louis XIV, the grandfather of the present German Emperor did while following the tradition of Frederick

the Great. William II now gives earnest of even better intentions, based on wider knowledge. We wish men of science could look with equal confidence to the high places of our own land.

There is hope, too, but less, for those parts of nearer Asia which are still under Oriental rule. Persia has admitted French excavators; and, though little has been effected by them yet in the ill-governed south-western province, any concession by that Mullah-ridden Government to alien research is a gain. The construction of the German railway to Baghdad, if effected in the present Emperor's lifetime, will be accompanied, as it has already been preceded, by German scholarly investigation. We may rest assured that Dr Koldewey's expedition to Babylon is only the first of many German scientific enterprises. William II is quite aware that monuments can be erected more lasting than railways. The sympathy with which the late Shammar Emir of Nejd received the last men of science, Huber and Euting, who penetrated to his capital, encouraged hopes that all the scientific secrets of Arabia might soon be laid open. But Huber's untimely death near Jidda at the hands of common robbers seems to have discouraged all imitators; and now that the great Mohammed ibn Rashid is gathered to his murdered fathers, and, under the weaker hand of his nephew, Nejd appears to be once more a theatre of internecine war, it cannot be expected that infidel men of peace should be able to do serious work in the great peninsula.

Upon the Ottoman Government no sure hope can be founded. Now it admits, oftener it refuses, with all the obstinacy that it dares employ, to admit scientific investigators within its territories. We may be sure that not only has it no sympathy with their work, but a most active dislike of it; and that nothing but political fear or political hope induces a grudging consent. This unreasonable attitude of suspicion and obscurantism is reinforced, it must be allowed, by a more reasonable, if not more excusable, plea, namely, that in a large part of the Ottoman dominion the personal safety of scientific parties cannot be guaranteed by the nominal authority. This is especially the case in the wide lands inhabited by Arabicspeaking populations, as excavators at Cyrene, at Niffer in Babylonia, and even in Palestine, have had reason to

know. It is hardly less the case where Kurds abound; and a few miles from all large towns in the western provinces of the empire, the foreigner, camped for long in one place, and dispensing, as an excavator must dispense, considerable sums of money, is never safe from the attempts of brigands.

For one reason or another no part of Turkey is ground on which an archæological explorer would elect to work, if other ground nearly as promising were open to him. While certain tracts of the empire are practically closed, in none is it possible to institute an investigation for which continuity and complete freedom of action have to be assured for a considerable space of time. Such work as Professor Ramsay did in Asia Minor between 1878 and 1891 was hampered, after he lost the powerful consular support of Sir Charles Wilson, by every kind of discouragement. To have always the expectation, and now and then the actual experience, of the seizure of all papers by any or every official, from a Vali to a Mudir, is not the condition in which a man of science can do his best work. Two generations of foreign ministers and ambassadors have not been able, by pressure on the Porte, to extend the liberty secured to science early in the last century by the liberation of Greece and the establishment of the Khedivate. The wonder is that so much exploration should actually have been done in the Ottoman dominion for the past sixty years, and that pioneers of science, mostly German, should still be prepared to carry on so uphill and dangerous a task.

Art. V.-A BRITISH ACADEMY OF LEARNING.

1. Geschichte der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Three vols. By Adolf Harnack. Berlin: Stilke, 1900.

2. L'Histoire et l'œuvre de l'Ecole française d'Athènes. By Georges Radet. Paris: Fontemoing, 1901.

3. Annual Address to the Society of Arts, 1900. By Sir John Evans. Journal of the Society of Arts,' 1900. 4. Association Internationale des Académies. Première assemblée générale tenue à Paris (Report). Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1901.

Two celebrations have recently taken place on the Continent which have, perhaps in consequence of our preoccupation with military affairs, not aroused in this country the attention which they may fairly claim. They are triumphs of a kind, or at least marked stages in a career of triumph; but the successes have been peaceful, and tended not to embitter nation against nation, but to unite the peoples in a common campaign of civilisation. These two events are the centenary of the foundation of the French Institute, in its final and complete form-for its beginnings go back far into the seventeenth century-and the bicentenary of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. It is worth while to claim the patience of the English reader while we attempt briefly to explain what the effect of these great institutions has been on the growth of knowledge, and to show that we in England might have been wiser had we more closely followed their example.

It is to be feared that the majority of well-informed Englishmen have no very clear notion of the work of the continental Institutes. If one of our known writers speaks with admiration of the French Institute, his hearers are almost sure to think that he wants to set up in this country an imitation of the Académie Française with its forty immortals, selected and laureate members of the literary class of Paris, great novelists or poets or essayists. A purely literary academy of this kind would serve no real purpose among us, although Matthew Arnold was disposed to sigh for it. It would not be possible here to select for special honour forty of our literary men ; and to assign to them a pension, as the French do, would be