with the theologies and cosmogonies of the Persians and Chaldæans, and with the magical practices and incantations of the Babylonians. Deeply interesting as these would have been from the archæological and anthropological standpoint, we perhaps need not deplore their loss overmuch. The few references made to them in the remainder of the work go to show that here too the author had no very profound acquaintance with, or first-hand knowledge of, his subject, and that the scanty information that he had succeeded in collecting regarding it was only thrown in by him as an additional support for his main thesis. This last, which is steadily kept in view throughout the book, is that the peculiar tenets and practices of the Gnostics and other heretics of his time were not derived from any misinterpretation of the Scriptures, but were a sort of amalgam of those current among the heathen with the opinions held by the philosophers[3] as to the origin of all things. The same reproach of scanty information cannot be brought against the books discovered by Mynas. Book IV, four pages at the beginning of which have perished, deals with the arts of divination as practised by the arithmomancers, astrologers, magicians and other charlatans who infested Rome in the first three centuries of our era; and the author’s account, which the corruption of the text makes rather difficult to follow, yet gives us a new and unexpected insight into the impostures and juggleries by which they managed to bewilder their dupes. Books V to IX deal in detail with the opinions of the heretics themselves, and differ from the accounts of earlier heresiologists by quoting at some length from the once extensive Gnostic literature, of which well-nigh the whole has been lost to us.[4] Thus, our author gives us excerpts from a work called the _Great Announcement_, attributed by him to Simon Magus, from another called _Proastii_ used by the sect of the Peratæ, from the _Paraphrase of Seth_ in favour with the Sethiani, from the _Baruch_ of one Justinus, a heresiarch hitherto unknown to us, and from a work by an anonymous writer belonging to the Naassenes or Ophites, which is mainly a Gnostic explanation of the hymns used in the worship of Cybele.[5] Besides these, there are long extracts from Basilidian and Valentinian works which may be by the founders of those sects, and which certainly give us a more extended insight into their doctrines than we before possessed; while Book X contains what purports to be a summary of the whole work.