The editor of the recent volume of the Inscriptiones Graecae, which comprises the inscriptions of Laconia and Messenia, is to be congratulated upon the conclusion of a long and arduous task, and still more upon the careful and scholarly manner in which that task has been accomplished. Undertaken originally by Max Fraenkel, who devoted to it the few months of life which remained to him after editing the Argolic inscriptions (I.G. iv.), it was carried on by Hans von Prott, and after his sudden death in 1903 was entrusted by the Berlin Academy to Walter Kolbe, now Professor at the University of Rostock, who after almost ten years has completed it in a manner worthy of the august body under whose auspices it has been carried through. Out of 1626 inscriptions, 158 had not been previously published, while the texts of those which were already known have gained much by correction, based usually upon the copies of the editor or of von Prott, and by judicious restoration. The present writer has to acknowlege a number of errors and omissions in the epigraphical section of the Sparta Museum Catalogue which are set right in this volume.