20 FEBRUARY 1904, Page 24

We have received from the British and Foreign Bible Society

the first volume of an Historical Catalogue of Printed Bibles, com- piled by T. H. Darlow, MA., and H. F. Moule, M.A. This first volume deals with English Bibles ; the second, to be published in the course of the current year, will " enumerate editions of the Sciiptures in all other languages with a prefixed list of polyglots " (11s. 6d. net the 2 vols.) It need hardly be said that a book of this kind has a most significant bearing on the history of religious thought. The very fact that English Bibles occupy as much space in the catalogue as all others put together is notable in itself. Another significant fact is the absence or presence of the Apocrypha. The earliest example given is a facsimile of a fragment of W. Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (the original is in the Grenville Collection, belonging to the British Museum), This bears the date of 1525. To this century belong in all a hundred and ninety-nine issues (from July, 1553, when King Edward VI. died, down to 1560, only one Bible appeared). In 1560 the first edition of the Genevan Bible appeared. In the seventeenth century 477 editions appeared ; in the eighteenth, 307; in the nineteenth, 348 ; but then a number of reprints, &c., are passed without notice. A supplementary list gives a number of versions in dialect.—With this we may mention The English Bible: Apocrypha, Vol. V. of the Bible and %XXVII. of the series of "Tudor Translations" (D. Nutt).