ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900. Brazil and French Guiana boundary dispute. See (in this volume) BRAZIL: A. D. 1900. ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900. Compulsory arbitration voted for at Spanish-American Congress. See (in this volume) SPAIN: A. D. 1900 (NOVEMBER). ARBITRATION TREATY, Great Britain and the United States. Its defeat. See (in this volume) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1897 (JANUARY-MAY). ----------ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Start-------- ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: The Oriental Field. Recent achievements and future prospects. "Three successive years have just added to the realm of Egyptian archaeology, not only the period of the first two dynasties, hitherto absolutely unrecognized from contemporary remains, but also a long prehistoric period. Assyriology likewise has lately been pushed back into antiquity with almost equal rapidity. Though the subjects will probably always have their limitations, yet the insight of scholars and explorers is opening up new vistas on all sides. … Our prospect for the future is bright. Egypt itself seems inexhaustible. Few of the cities of Babylonia and Assyria have yet been excavated, and each of them had its library and record office of clay-tablets as well as monuments in stone and bronze. In Northern Mesopotamia are countless sites still untouched; in Elam and in Armenia monuments are only less plentiful. {12} In Arabia inscriptions are now being read which may perhaps date from 1000 B. C. The so-called Hittite hieroglyphs still baffle the decipherer; but as more of the documents become known these will in all likelihood prove a fruitful source for the history of North Syria, of Cappadocia, and of Asia Minor throughout. Occasionally, too, though it is but rarely, an inscription in the Phaenician type of alphabet yields up important historical facts. When all is done, there is but scant hope that we shall be able to construct a consecutive history of persons and events in the ancient world. All that we can be confident of securing, at any rate in Egypt, is the broad outline of development and change, chronologically graduated and varied by occasional pictures of extraordinary minuteness and brilliancy." _F. LL. Griffith, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, pages. 218-219 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)._ ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: In Bible Lands: General results as affecting our knowledge of the ancient Hebrews.