and elevated in the order and grade of festal classification. Again, the considerable number of festivals of the Greek and Russian Churches connected with relics and wonder-working _icons_ throws a light on the intellectual standpoint and the current beliefs in these ancient branches of the Catholic Church. Not less instructive in exhibiting the extraordinary growth in the _cultus_ of the Blessed Virgin in the West are the inferences which may be gathered from a knowledge of the fact that no festival of the Virgin was celebrated in the Church of Rome before the seventh century, when we compare the crowd of festivals, major and minor, devoted to the Virgin in the Roman Kalendar of to-day. But considerations of this kind are only incidentally touched on in the following pages; and they are referred to here simply with a view to show that the study of the Kalendar is not an enquiry interesting merely to dry-as-dust antiquaries, but one which is intimately connected with the study of the history of belief, and is inwoven with far-reaching issues. In the enquiry into the origins of ecclesiastical observances the discovery within recent years of early documents, hitherto unknown in modern days, enforces the obvious thought that our conceptions on such subjects must be liable to re-adjustment from time to time in the light of new evidence. Until the day comes, if it ever comes, when it can be said with truth that the materials supplied by the early manuscripts of the East and West have been exhausted, there can be no finality. The document discovered some ten or twelve years ago, in which a lady from Gaul or Spain, who had gone on pilgrimage to the East, records her impressions of religious observances which she had witnessed at Jerusalem towards the close of the fourth century, has furnished some important light on the subject before us, as well as on the history of ceremonial. In the following pages this document is referred to as the _Pilgrimage of Silvia_ (‘Peregrinatio Silviae’), without prejudice to the question relating to the true name of the writer. The period when the work was written is the important question for our purposes; and those who are most competent to express an opinion consider that it belongs to the time of Theodosius the Great, and to a date between the years 383 and 394. The influence of the early mediaeval martyrologists, Bede, Florus, Ado, and Usuard, upon the mediaeval Kalendars, is unquestionable; but the relations of their works to one another, the variations of the different recensions and the sources from which they were drawn, are still subjects of investigation. In addition to the brief notices of the martyrologists which will be found in the following pages, the enquirer who desires further information should not fail to study with care the recent treatise of Dom Henri Quentin, of Solesmes, _Les Martyrologes historiques_.