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There is a considerable amount of interesting and somewhat recondite, not to say uncanny, information contained in the initial number of the twenty-fourth volume of the Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law 'The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe' is a theme which in the hands of a William Draper, Henry Lea, or an Andrew White, would yield unfathomed depths of storied wickedness, ignorance, and superstition, all flowing out of the Catholic Church. In the hands of Mr. Thorndike, however, it unfolds no such legend.The term magic lends itself to no process of rigid defining, and so the author allows it to cover beliefs in auguries, omens, divinations, sorcery, necromancy, astrology, alchemy, and other such occult agencies which our wiser age has found to be on the whole highly superstitious and absurd. That such beliefs have existed 'semper et ubique' everybody knows. That they mingled with and not infrequently dominated much of what there was of empirical science in the Middle Ages is of course a bit of history possessed even by Macaulay's school-boy. The indebtedness, however, of the medieval and, through them, of the modern time to the ancients, especially the Romans -- for the heritage of superstitious belief and practice -- is probably not so widely nor so well known. Those who are interested in the story will find the hundred pages devoted to it in the pamphlet just mentioned, rich in material and suggestive of still fuller sources. The author's aim, it must be remembered, is purely historical -- to describe the prevalence of magic, and that chiefly within the Roman Empire. His work is in no sense a science or a philosophy of the subject.

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