Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/309

 1920 SHORT NOTICES 301 It is a great pity that the excellent work done by classical scholars in Scandinavia is not better known in England. Thus a work by a Swedish scholar, Rudberg, on Posidonius is here quoted, which seems undeservedly to have escaped notice in this country. G. C. R. Although it does not fall within the province of this Review to discuss La Langue Gauloise, Textes, Grammaire, et Glossaire, by M. Georges Dottin (Paris : Klincksieck, 1920), there are many historical students who will be glad to be directed to a book in which they can find an exhaustive and trustworthy collection of the extant remains of Gaulish, accompanied by a grammar and vocabulary embodying the results of investigation with regard to the structure and affinities of the language. It is needless to say that M. Dottin is a scholar of the highest authority in this department of Celtic philology, and he knows how to present his information in a lucid and attractive style. His brief sketch of the history of Gaulish studies from the sixteenth century onwards will be found interesting by many readers who have no special knowledge of philology. F. In his ample monograph, The Roman Fort at Piercebridge, County Durham (Frome : Butler & Tanner, 1917), Mr. Edward "Wooler, F.S.A., deals with an unexplored camp on the north bank of the Tees. Here the Roman road called Watling Street crossed the river, carried on the piers of a bridge of which practically all trace has vanished. The camp and the neighbouring church of Gainford have yielded a few inscriptions, including altars to lupiter Dolichenus and to Mars Condate. The British Museum possesses a very interesting bronze of a ploughman steering a two-ox plough, dug up on this site. A few interments were discovered when the railway line was made, and a bath-house was laid bare in 1849, though no details are recorded. Perhaps one day the spade of the excavator will reveal the secrets of what may well be an interesting fort. In the meantime it hardly required a volume of 190 pages to tell the little that is known. But Mr. Wooler is a discursive writer. G. Mr. Montagu Sharpe's Middlesex in British, Roman, and Saxon Times (London : Bell, 1919) is the production of an enthusiastic amateur, whose serious work in life presumably lies in other fields than that of historical investigation. Mr. Sharpe's name is honourably associated with the researches which have made it fairly probable that Caesar crossed the Thames near Brentford, and which have at any rate discredited the once prevailing theory that the crossing took place at Coway Stakes. The pages of his book concerned with this subject, though containing a large admix- ture of questionable hypothesis, are quite worthy of attention. In the other chapters he attempts to deal with questions for which he has obviously no adequate scholarly equipment. His Greek and Latin quotations (in some instances at least) are taken from antiquated editions, without regard to recent critical work on the texts. In his account of Middlesex in British times he ekes out the deficiency of authentic information with an imaginative description of a hunting expedition, in which King Cassi- vellaunus was accompanied by a daughter so far in advance of her age