CURRENT LITERATURE
IMPERIAL ROME. By Martin Nilsson. Translated by C. al Richards, D.D. (Bell. 21s. ) ONLY recently we had occasion to pay a tribute to Professor Nilsson's thorough-going scholarship. Here is another example of his patient method, akin to that of Sir James Frazer, or Westermarek. This is a history of the Roman Empire, from the murder of Julius Caesar to the days of the decline ig the fourth century after our Lord, giving us a concise de- scription of the Roman world-power acting as a civilizing agent
on its newly-acquired peoples, and thereby creating avenue& for a centripetal reaction which was to feed the Mother State with mental and moral vitality, to bolster it up for several centuries, and so to maintain the Empire intact although the- core was rotten. The book ends with a. masterly survey of the problems of population within the Empire, which should
be particularly useful to the student of genetics. The book contains forty-nine illustrations and a clearly printed. map of the Empire.
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