GENERAL HISTORY OF WESTERN NATIONS.
General History of Western Nations, 5,000 B.C.-1900 A.D. By Emil Reich, D.J. Part I., Vols. I. and II. (Macmillan and Co. 15s. net.)—Dr. Emil Reich, not to be left behind by his contemporaries, gives to the world a "Universal His- tory." It is limited to the West, it is true, but its range is sufficiently large,—nearly seven thousand years in con- siderably less than a thousand pages. Dr. Reich is somewhat paradoxical, and very firmly convinced of his being in the right. There has been, for instance, a fairly unanimous opinion that the Sicilian Expedition was a mistake. The mere waste of the naval and military forces employed was too much for the population of Athens to stand, even if there had been no defeat. Dr. Reich allows that it was ill managed, but thinks that it was a necessary development of Imperial expansion. There is no doubt what Thucydides thought about it. Then Dr. Reich is very severe on the " higher critics." Curiously enough, he makes statements on his own account which are inconsistent with traditional views of Hebrew history. The very title of his book is one of them. If his history begins with 5,000 B.C., it must go back beyond the Deluge. The Ussher chronology, as it is commonly called, is inextricably mixed up with the traditional history.
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