excesses of extravagance when her learned admirers were forgotten for unworthy favorites. Among the latter, Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie was for a long time all-powerful. The grandson of General Pontus and a daughter of John III., he was the son of Count Jacob de la Gardie and Ebba Brahe, and one of the most brilliant noblemen of Europe. In his youth he formed an intimate friendship with the dauphin of France, later Louis XIV., who throughout his life honored him with the title of “Mon Cousin,” or “Mon cher Cousin.” His ambition to become Queen Christine’s consort was never satisfied, nor was he allowed to accept the rank of a prince from the German emperor, but the queen made him the richest man in her realm. Magnus de la Gardie did not possess the sterling qualities of his ancestors, but was of great patriotism and lavishly liberal toward educational institutions, in this respect without a peer in Swedish history. In 1666 he founded the Academy of Antiquities, which was the first archæological institution in Europe, the Swedish antiquarians of the day, principal among them Bureus and Stiernhielm, doing valuable antiquarian research. In 1664, Count de la Gardie donated to the University Library of Upsala a highly valuable collection of manuscripts and books, chiefly from Iceland. In the collection was also the Gothic Bible translation of Bishop Wulfila in the only copy extant. Liberal with his silver, Count de la Gardie gave to the precious book a silver binding, as he had in earlier years presented to Queen Christine a silver throne (which is still in use). This book has an interesting history of its own. Codex Argenteus, the silver book, thus called on account of its silver binding, contains fragments of the four Gospels in the Gothic language. The translation was made from the Greek original by Bishop Wulfila (b. 318-d. 388), the apostle of the Goths. The writing is done in so-called encaustum (printing with heated stamps) of gold and silver letters on vellum of scarlet color. This copy is considered to have been made toward the end of the fifth or in the beginning of the sixth century, when the East Goths still held sway in Italy. Its early fortunes are unknown, but it is supposed that the book was found in the possession of the Visigoths (or West Goths) when their empire was seized by the Franks, and donated to the monastery of Verden by some munificent Frankish chief. Here, in the Benedictine abbey of Verden, on the river Ruhr, in Westphalia, the book was discovered at least as early as 1554, when the scholars Cassander and Gualther of Cologne are known to have had copies which can have been made from no other source.