undertaken to illustrate the text of Dante. So far as we can tell, therefore, Baldi would seem to have made no independent research on his own account regarding Scot’s life and literary labours, but to have depended entirely upon very obvious and commonplace printed authorities. To crown all, he assigns 1240 as the _floruit_ of Michael Scot, a date at least five years posterior to that of his death! On the whole then there is little cause to regret that his work on this subject is not more fully accessible. My study of the life and times of Scot thus resumed its natural tendency towards an independent form, there being no text known to me that could in any way supply the want of an original biography. It is for the reader to judge how far the boldness of such an attempt has been justified by its success. The difficulties of the task have certainly been increased by the want of any previous collections that could be called satisfactory. Boece, Dempster, and Naudé yield little in the way of precise and instructive detail; their accounts of Scot fall to be classed with that of Baldi as partly incorrect and partly commonplace. Schmuzer alone seems by the title of his work[1] to promise something more original. Unfortunately my attempts to obtain it have been defeated by the great rarity of the volume, which is not to be found in any of the libraries to which I have access. This failure in the department of biography already formed has obliged me to a more exact and extensive study of original manuscript sources for the life of Scot than I might otherwise have thought necessary, and has proved thus perhaps rather of advantage. It is inevitable indeed that a work of this kind, undertaken several ages too late, should be comparatively barren in those dates and intimate details which are so satisfactory to our curiosity when we can fall upon them. In the absence of these, however, our attention is naturally fixed, and not, as it seems to me, unprofitably, on what is after all of higher or more enduring importance. The mind is free to take a wider range, and in place of losing itself in the lesser facts of an individual life, studies the intellectual movements and gauges the progress of what was certainly a remarkable epoch in philosophy, science, and literature. The almost exact reproduction in Spain during the thirteenth century of the Alexandrian school of thought and science and even superstition; the part played by the Arab race in this curious transference, and the close relation it holds to our modern intellectual life—if the volume now published be found to throw light on subjects so little understood, yet so worthy of study, I shall feel more than rewarded for the pains and care spent in its preparation.