23 APRIL 1921, Page 25

We have received the second part, completing the first volume

of the new Catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library at Providence, Rhode Island—the second finest public collection in the United States of books relating to America. It is a pleasure to handle this beautiful volume, printed in a fine type on such paper as we rarely see nowadays in England. Tho catalogue has been compiled with scholarly thoroughness, giving for each book the exact title, the measurements, and, in many cases, particulars about its former ownership. 111 this part the catalogue of the earlier books, arranged in order of publication, is continued from 1569 to 1599. The collector's eye will glisten as he reads of one rare and precious work after another—the Frobisher of 1577, the Linschoten of 1598, the superb copy of the first edition of Hakluyt in 1598, the 1596 edition of Ralegh's narrative of his expedition to Guiana, the early English version of Las Cases besides the Spanish, French, and other editions of that famous historian of the Spanish conquest of the Indies, and some of the very scarce books printed at Mexico and Lima in the sixteenth century. At the end of the volume is a compact catalogue of the library's fine set of the Voyages published by De Bry at Frankfort between 1590 and 1644. As students know, this formidable and costly work, with its many engravings, was issued in varying editions and no two sets are quite identical. The late Lord Crawford devoted an elaborate treatise to the description of all the recorded issues of Do Bry's collection. The John Carter Brown set seems to be unusually complete. There is also a good set of the rival publication, in quarto, of Ifulsius. The volume is elaborately indexed.