The Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan has recently acquired a small collection of engraved stones, with a few metal objects; most of them are amulets of the kind conventionally called gnostic — a description which, as is now recognized, is usually misleading. The collection was assembled in the Levant, chiefly in Syria. One of the stones, the occasion of this note, is now a mere fragment, probably a little more than half its original size. It is a piece of haematite, 27 mm. high, 10 mm. wide, and 5 mm. in thickness. When entire it was rectangular, as is shown by the fact that a borderdesign, a sort of feather pattern, is preserved at the top and right side, and makes a right angle at the upper right-hand corner. After the left side of the stone was broken away the remaining fragment was rounded off at the bottom, perhaps to remove a rough edge and make the piece into a more convenient shape. The fact that the fragment was preserved and re-shaped is not without interest as showing how tenaciously their possessors clung to amulets of this kind. Something of the same sort happened to a rather elaborately carved haematite which came into my own collection from Egypt. It was originally a fairly broad oval, but at some time a splinter was broken off the right side, after which loss the rough edge was ground down and an approximately oval shape restored. In the University's collection there is still another haematite which, after a part of the stone had been lost, was set in a protecting mounting fitted to its altered shape. All collectors, of course, are aware that haematite is peculiarly liable to splintering fracture.

There are two important chronological questions in the history of the Fourth Gospel: the date of its composition and the date of its acceptance by the church. The solution of the first depends in large measure on the question of John's use of the synoptic gospels. Did he use them at all? And, if he did, in what way? There can be no doubt that if he knew them he had little interest in their historical value. But does this mean that he had more authentic historical data? Or that he was interested not in history but in theology?

William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”

In Philo, as in any other philosopher, the problem of the freedom of the will in man is but a special phase of the more general problems of the existence of immutable laws in nature and the relation of mind to body. Now with regard to laws of nature Philo's view is clear. There are, according to him, certain unalterable laws by which the universe is governed, but these laws were established in the universe by God at the time of its creation. This view is expressed by him in a variety of ways in such statements as that there are “ordinances and laws which God laid down in the universe as unalterable” and that “this world is the Megalopolis and it has a single polity and a single law.” These laws of nature are sometimes designated by him in their totality by the general term Logos, by which he means an immanent Logos in the created physical universe, conceiving of it as part of that incorporeal Logos which existed prior to the creation of the universe. It is this immanent Logos which is described by him as “the bond of all existence,” which “holds and knits together all the parts” and which also “administers all things.”