articles from the pens of Dantists and Romance and Arabic scholars of note in Europe and America, expounding or criticising the thesis. Asín has intervened in the controversy to sum up the judgments, favourable, adverse or doubtful, and finally refute his opponents; this he has done in different publications,[1] and the present is a translation of the work containing the original thesis. The balance of opinion is strongly in his favour. Apart from a score or so of adverse critics, mainly of Italian nationality, whose attitude is to be accounted for on the grounds of national or pro-Dante prejudice, an immense majority of critics of all nations, whose competence, whether as Romance or Arabic scholars and whose impartiality are beyond all question, has opted in favour of Asín Palacios’ theory. Both parties to the controversy have been unanimous and unstinting in their praise of the book. Pio Rajna, the chief of the Italian Dantists, writing in _Nuova Antologia_, admits that the importance of the thesis is so far-reaching that “if it were true, it would lead to a conception of Dante differing considerably from that hitherto formed by the Dantists.” Parodi, another leading figure among the Dantists of Italy, in the _Bulletino della società dantesca italiana_ confesses that “this book has had a more than flattering reception, it has roused a feeling of curiosity mingled with astonishment in all who have read it and has won the approval and assent of not a few.” Nallino, Professor of Arabic at the University of Rome, stated in the _Rivista degli studi orientali_ that the book was “of great value as a contribution to mediæval studies in general, as proving the hitherto unsuspected infiltration of Islamic conceptions of the after-life into the popular beliefs of Western Christendom; and, especially, as one of the most important works on the religion of Islam that have of late appeared.” Bonucci, Professor at the University of Sienna, in the _Rivista di Studi filosofici e religiosi_, affirms that “a book such as this does more to advance the history of, and comment on, Dante’s thought than a whole century of the minutiæ of the Dantists.” Friedrich Beck, the famous Romance scholar of Germany, writes in the _Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie_: “No book on Dante of such importance has appeared for years; we wonder whether the Italians, in their patriotic pride, can find a work of theirs to equal that of the learned Spaniard. Asín has given a great impulse to the study of Dante and has opened up vistas so startlingly new that the students will be bound to seek new bearings and adopt fresh points of view.” Söderhjelm, Professor of Romance languages at the University of Helsingfors, in _Neuphilologische Mitteilungen_, says: “This book is a revelation and an event; it will doubtless be regarded as one of the most notable, perhaps the most notable of all, literary productions that have marked the Jubilee of Dante.”