When we met again it was of course found that they were at different degrees of advancement; but all, at any rate, were at a stage at which profitable work could be conducted, as was the remainder of our work, in face of the inscriptions themselves. The inscriptions were carefully selected in advance, out of the great wealth of available material, with reference to the illustration of certain groups of subjects. A brief introduction of a quarter of an hour or so was given, from time to time, as the taking up of a new subject made it necessary. But in the main the sessions were devoted to the interpretations of inscriptions by one and another of the class, the rest, so far as possible, making corrections or suggestions where the interpreter went astray.

It is a regular part of the plan of the School that our students shall have two months in Greece under the general direction of the head of the American School there. None of the men of this first year had yet visited Greece, and accordingly all have gone, a part of them accompanying Mr. Lord, the Director of the School of Architecture, through Sicily. Among other things, it has been arranged that, despite the unusual pressure for places brought about this year by the Olympic games, two of the School shall accompany Dr. Dörpfeld on his trip through the Peloponnesus, and five on his island trip.

On their return, toward the end of May, our students will spend ten days in Pompeii and the Museum of Naples, directed by Dr. Mau, the editor of Overbeck's Pompeii, and the most eminent specialist in what may be described as a profession in itself.

The lectures of Dr. Hülsen in Topography and Professor Melampo in Palaeography go on quite independently of our School. The lectures of Professor Stevenson upon Numismatics, on the other hand, and of Dr. Mau upon Pompeii, being given solely for our students, and receiving a compensation from the School treasury, may justly be regarded as courses of the School, and will, I hope, form a permanent part of our curriculum. As to the languages employed in these and other courses, it is worth while to say that spoken German and Italian, as well as written French, have lost whatever terrors they may have had for our students at the outset, an incidental gain of no small value.

Beside the regular work now described, mention may be made of a visit of the School to Ostia, conducted by Professor Lanciani,

of a visit to the Vatican Library under Father Ehrle, its Prefect, and of a trip to the valley and probable site of Horace's Sabine Farm, under my own guidance. A few of our men were also able to attend Professor Petersen's lectures in the winter, and several of them went with him upon his excursion to Hadrian's Villa. To this I should add that, thanks to the bicycle (which no student or director should be without), our men have been able to make themselves thoroughly familiar with the Campagna, and to visit easily many points of interest in it and beyond it, such as Veii, Livia's Villa at Porta Prima, Soracte, Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, Frascati, Albano, the Alban Lake, the Lake of Nemi, Ostia, and the Sacred Grove of the Arval Brothers. Best of all, perhaps, is the storing up of memories of color and atmosphere and form of a noble and immensely varied landscape, filled with historical and literary associations.

The School has obtained the permission of the Italian government to make and furnish casts of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, one of the best preserved monuments of ancient Italy, and counting among its reliefs what is probably the noblest piece of Roman sculpture that has come down to us. The work, which was projected by Professor Frothingham and is under his care, will be executed by the skilful caster who has just completed for the German Institute the casts of the reliefs of the Column of Marcus Aurelius. The money has been raised, partly in America, mainly through the efforts of the chairman of the year and next director, Professor Warren, and of Professor Kelsey, of Ann Arbor, and partly among American residents or visitors in Italy. The policy of the Italian governmenment, unlike that of Greece, does not grant to foreign schools the right to excavate. Professor Frothingham has, however, been able to make, from surface study, a valuable, if necessarily incomplete, topographical plan of Norba, a town in the Volscian mountains, just above the western plain. The importance of Norba lies in its being the only city with considerable traces of pre-Roman structures within its walls. The study of it will probably solve a question which has been much in debate, namely, whether the polygonal masonry in these cities of Latium is early or late. Professor Frothingham has also been able to trace the pre-Roman roads connecting Norba and the adjoining cities. A paper on these two subjects was read by him at a recent meeting of the German Institute.

I had set my heart upon the publication by the School of a complete facsimile of some important Latin manuscripts, and made attempts to get this privilege, first in Rome, then in Florence. The policy both of the Vatican and of the Italian government proved to be the same as the policy of the government with regard to excavations. Indirectly, however, our efforts bore fruit; for Father Ehrle, of the Vatican Library, seeing the real interest taken by the School in Palaeography, and convinced of the serious character of our students, young though they are, compared with the workers usually admitted to the Library, granted admission, first to several of them, and then to all the rest. No manuscript upon which any of them had wished to work, no matter how precious, has been refused. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this privilege. The Vatican is rich in treasures, and it is literally true that manuscripts not known to exist are occasionally found there (as in the present year), by the discovery that there are two manuscripts, one of a Greek author and one of Latin, in a codex which had been entered in the old catalogue under the name of one author only.

Of course it is not to be expected that an accomplished palaeographist can be made in a year. Several of our students have, however, acquired a taste which will be pretty sure to bring them back to European libraries in the future; and, even now, some of them are engaged upon work which it is hoped will yield fruit. Two are busy with uncollated manuscripts of Catullus, and another with the alphabets of several early manuscripts of Virgil. A fourth is making a study of the ninth century Carlovingian manuscript of the third decade of Livy. This manuscript is universally recognized as a copy of the Paris uncial manuscript of the fifth or sixth century. There are various theories with regard to the ways in which our texts of classical authors have suffered change in transmission through the repeated making of copies of copies, which were themselves copies of copies; but the test of absolute knowledge of what has happened in a given case has not been applied. In the present instance, we can know, not only how one mind has actually worked in the copying of a manuscript, but how seven minds have worked; for this manuscript was copied by seven men, who divided the long labor among them. The results of the comparison are already promising.

The students now in Greece, whose ardor and youthful freshness and interest have been missed, even though their absence has given time for needed work, — seem to be bearing well the strain put upon their loyalty to Italy by their stay in the most exquisite country and spot in the world. One of them writes me that, while they have greatly enjoyed Greece and Athens, they are at heart a little homesick for Rome, and will be quite ready to come back. This is fortunate, for, while Greek literature appeals to young minds and old minds alike, a real appreciation of Roman literature demands a certain maturity; and it is well if this difference, which tends generally to carry a majority of our young graduate students into Greek rather than into Latin, can be offset by the power which the city of Rome itself exerts upon those who come here to study. The hurried traveler often fails to feel it; but those who live for any length of time in the great city which was the centre of the civilizing and organizing power of the ancient world, come, if they have any historic sense, to feel that sentiment which led the ancient Romans so often to call the city, in their inscriptions, the urbs sacra. This sense of the great place of Rome in the world will never pass away. Mommsen, the last speaker at the closing session of the German Institute, said, in the language which is de rigueur at these meetings, “noi passiamo: Roma resta eterna." To bring our future professors of Latin in colleges, and teachers of Latin in schools, under the power of this spell, and so to make them better professors and teachers, and the study of Latin a more human and civilizing study, is the aim of the School in Rome.

The students enrolled for the year of ten months as candidates for a certificate have been ten in number: three Fellows of the School, one Fellow of Harvard University, five Fellows of the University of Chicago,—one of them holding also a scholarship from the Northwestern University, and a Toronto graduate, the only member not holding a graduate Fellowship of some institution. Of these ten, one, the Fellow of the School in Christian Archaeology, has been engaged with this subject only. The rest have been students on the pagan side, though several of them have attended Professor Frothingham's lectures on Christian Archaeology, without doing outside work in the subject. It is an interesting fact that two of the ten full members are already

Professors of Latin, at the head of their departments, in two of our smaller colleges. The number of special students, those who are in the School for more than three months, but less than ten, has been two, both, like the others, college graduates, one of Princeton, and one of Trinity College, N. C.

Such is the record of the year. A dozen picked young men,a larger number than in any of the other foreign schools in Rome; courses in Topography, Classical Archaeology, Pagan and Christian Epigraphy, Numismatics, and Paleography; actual work at manuscripts in the Library of the Vatican; two months in Greece, with excursions with Dörpfeld for seven out of the ten fully enrolled students; and ten days in Pompeii and the Museum at Naples under Mau. What would not many men have given for such help of books and instructions as these twelve men have had?

Yet we have made only a beginning. In the hard times in which our initial work in America had to be done, and in the brief four months during which, as it happened, our guaranties were to be found or not, the utmost we could hope to do was to raise subscriptions which would insure the continuance of the School for three years. These subscriptions had of course to be supplemented by what may be called loans of professors, made by their universities for a year at a time. We need an endowment, and a permanent director, who shall devote his life to some part of the group of subjects to be dealt with here, as the professors of the German Institute devote theirs. The second is possible the moment the other comes. The present system is in itself a bad one, and is, moreover, misunderstood among European scholars. Mommsen, for example, said to me that he could not think well of the system of constant change of directors practiced by the School at Athens (he was behind the times on this point), and apparently to be practiced by the School in Rome. My answer was that I was glad to hear his condemnation, that I might assure him that we ourselves thought as badly of the system as he did, and resorted to it only as an inevitable beginning, until we had money. But," he answered, "you have so much money in America, and give it so freely for education." The first is true, the second is true, and the unspoken inference ought surely to come true. W. G. Hale, '70.

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ROME, April 29, 1896.