Abstract
IT is not usual for two volumes of the same work to be published thirty years apart. In Sir William Ridge way's case the reason is that he began to write about the prehistory of Greece and found himself drawn into writing a prehistory of Europe; for the wide range of his theories led him to consider one district after another, Illyria, Italy, Central Europe, Ireland. The material to be studied was vast and constantly increasing, the angles from which he studied it were many, archæological, sociological, religious, and literary. It is not to be wondered at if it grew unmanageable, especially for one of advancing years and failing eyesight. A lesser man would have given up the task altogether; but Ridgeway struggled on, wrote two or three lesser works dealing with fragments of his material or with subsidiary problems, and finally left behind at his death in 1926 an immensity of half-written work, in all stages from notes to proof-sheets, from which at last a selection has been published by the editors of this volume. Nearly seven hundred and fifty pages, illustrated with 158 figures, are by no means a contemptible fragment; we may judge how enormous the complete work would have been if it had ever seen light in the form the author meant it to have.
The Early Age of Greece.
By Sir William Ridgeway. Vol. 2. Edited by A. S. F. Gow and D. S. Robertson. Pp. xxviii + 747. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1931.) 30s. net.
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ROSE, H. The Early Age of Greece . Nature 129, 597 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129597a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129597a0