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 6i8 Notes and News MEDIEVAL HISTORY. Mr. Guy le Strange, in his Baghdad during the Abbasid CalipJiafe (Clarendon Press), has devoted himself chiefly to the topographical an- tiquities of that city. Eight plans constructed by him form the main basis of his text. Twenty-one chapters of topography are followed by three containing a sketch of the history of the city of Baghdad during the period named. A Histo/y of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Opening of the Tenth to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century (A. D. 900-1250), by Mr. C. Raymond Beazley, the continuation of the author's previous work on the period from the conversion of the Roman Empire to 900 A. D., is announced by Mr. John Murray. M. ¥.. Chatelain has rendered an important service to medieval palaeography by his Introduction a la Lecture des Notes Tironienncs, published by the author, and accompanied with an album of eighteen illustrative plates. Mr. Henry C. Lea's History of the Inquisition is being issued in a French translation. Two volumes have already appeared. Professor Paul Fredericq has contributed an introduction, with a bibliography. The translation is by M. Salomon Reinach. The work is being exten- sively quoted and used by the Liberal party in French politics. Mr. Lea's pamphlet' on The Dead Hand (Philadelphia, Dornan, 1900) has also been translated. MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY. Six years ago Father L. J. M. Cros, S. J., published a first series of Documents Nouveaux on St. Francis Xavier. Before printing more he has been persuaded by his publisher to bring out an extensive biography of the saint, for the general reader, Saint Fra}i(ois de Xavier ; Sa Vie et ses Zi?//'rM"lJ( Paris, Toulouse, Privat, pp. Ivi, 494, xl, 550). It is, how- ever, so richly " documented" as to present almost an autobiography. Meanwhile the editors of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu have published a first volume of Monumenta Xaveriana ex Autographis vel ex Antiijuioribus Exemplis collecta (Madrid, Avrial, xxxii, 1030, xxxii, 1030), embracing many letters and other writings and having prefixed to it a valuable life of the saint written in 1574, by Father Manoel Teixeira, a companion of the last days of Francis, and Father Alessandro Valignani. The Hakluyt Society will publish, this year, Mendana' s Voyage to the Solomon Islands in lj6S, in two volumes. Dr. Julius Beloch, in the Zeitschrift fiir Socialwissenschaft, III. 11, attempts an estimate of the population of Europe about A.D. 1600. He concludes that approximately there were in Italy thirteen millions, in France sixteen, in Germany twenty, in all Europe perhaps a hundred millions.