A pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called de pomo et morte incliti principis philosophorum Aristotelis has been printed several times in Europe, the earliest editions being without place or date. This work is a Latin translation of a Hebrew tract bearing the name “The Book of the Apple,” the translator being Manfred, King of Sicily (ob. 1266), or, as Steinschneider suggests, a Jew employed by him. The Hebrew text professes to be a translation from the Arabic made by R. Abraham B. Hisdai, an author who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. There are MSS. of B. Hisdai's work in the Vatican and at Oxford, and it has been repeatedly printed, first at Venice, 1519. It was republished with a new Latin translation and a copious but irrelevant commentary by J. J. Losius, at Giessen, in 1706.

If there be at sunrise stripes of red light in shape of fish and at sunset red rays of light stretching in diverging stripes from the west, Dunk says to Bhadli that rivers shall have foams.

The Institut des Langues Orientales of St. Petersburg has an admirable custom, which it were well if other similar institutions would imitate. From time to time it publishes, under the title of Collections Scientifiques, not mere catalogues of recent acquisitions, but full accounts of the more interesting manuscripts which have been added to its library, with copious extracts, tables of contents, and critical notes. The sixth volume of these Collections has lately appeared in two parts, of which the second is almost entirely filled with a description, from the pen of Baron Rosen, of certain Bábi MSS. acquired by the Institut. It is this second part of vol. vi that I propose specially to discuss here, but of the Bábí texts contained in vol. i (published in 1877) I shall also have something to say.

Of Aššurbêlkala, son and successor of the first Tiglath pileser, we know little. The so-called synchronous history devotes a few lines to his reign, from which, however, we learn nothing more than that in his time the peoples of Assyria and Babylon were united in the bonds of friendship aud alliance, and that he took to wife a Babylonian lady, daughter of the upstart Rammanâpluiddinna, King of Babylon (W. A. I., ii. 65, 25). Two only of Aššurbêlkala's inscriptions seem to have come down to us. Of these the more important runs in seven partly defaced lines across the back of a nude female torso carved in stone a little under life-size. This monument—of the highest interest from an archaeological point of view—was found at Kouyunjik, and is now preserved (No. 849) in the British Museum.