In his book Mr. Dickes abandons, or at least does not reprint, some of the more fantastic theories he advanced in his magazine articles; but in all that he has published on the subject his method of procedure is the simple one of denying the authenticity of all evidence which is destructive of his theory. Thus, he does not hesitate to declare the first document discovered by Miss Hervey to be an eighteenth-century forgery, and the two confirmatory papers amongst the Godefroy correspondence he places in the same category. With regard to the date and Holbein’s signature, he accepts as a fact the “staggering statement” of the Beaujon sale-catalogue that in 1787 the picture was unsigned and undated; and he infers that the inscription was added by Le Brun, and that the three documents discovered by Miss Hervey were all forgeries due to the same unscrupulous dealer. Why such an elaborate falsification should be thought necessary, and what purpose it served, unless merely to display the genealogical learning of the forger, Mr. Dickes fails to explain. When Le Brun issued his engraving in 1792, with a descriptive note lifted bodily from the Beaujon catalogue, and retaining the same title, “MM. de Selve et d’Avaux,” he had already sold the picture into England, so that to elaborate a series of forgeries in connection with it, and then scatter them about France and get them inserted among the papers of learned antiquaries, after the picture had left the country, would seem to be a very futile proceeding; and if he had added the date 1533 and a false signature to it before selling it he would surely have refrained from stating in his printed description of it that it was painted in “la manière dont il a marqué ses ouvrages HB. BH. 1515.” The whole theory, in fact, is absurd, as is Mr. Dickes’ further declaration that the name “Policy” on the globe is also a forgery due to Le Brun. The inscription on the book giving the age of George de Selve, “ætatis suæ 25,” is also a forgery according to the same authority, or rather, he holds that the last figure was originally an 8, but that it became damaged, and that when repaired it was altered to a 5 through the ignorance of the restorer. The alteration of the age from 25 to 28, it should be noted, is vital to Mr. Dickes’ argument, for otherwise the second figure cannot represent Count Philipp. Even this change, however, is not sufficient to put matters right, and so he assumes arbitrarily that although the picture was painted in 1533 (in spite of its forged date!) the ages of the sitters inscribed on the dagger and the book were purposely calculated from the previous year, in order to indicate that the painting was a memorial of the Nuremberg Treaty of 1532. Mr. Dickes professes to find further proofs of the ages of the sitters from the numerous accessories on the table. The cylindrical sundial is so arranged that it informs us that the sitter against whom it is placed was born on April 10th, about 10.30 P.