other routes to Asia by sea. Thence he proceeds to show (chapter iii.)
how the Italians in navigation and in map-making exhibited the same
pre-eminence as in commerce and the arts, and why Italy furnished so
many of the explorers of the western seas in the period of discovery.
It is an easy transition in chapter iv. to the dramatic story of the
efforts of the Portuguese to reach India round Africa. The next step is
to describe in some detail (chapters v. and vi.) the system of
government and of commerce which existed in Spain, France, and Holland
in the sixteenth century; and the book will surprise the reader in its
account of the effective and far-reaching administration of the Spanish
kingdom, the mother of so many later colonies. This discussion is very
closely connected with the account of Spanish institutions in the New
World as described by Bourne in his Spain in America (volume III. of
the series), and we find the same terms, such as "audiencia,"
"corregidor," and "Council of the Indies" reappearing in colonial
history. A much-neglected subject in American history is the
development of great commercial companies, which, in the hands of the
English, planted their first permanent colonies. To this subject
Professor Cheyney devotes two illuminating chapters (vii. and viii.),
in which he prints a list of more than sixty such companies chartered
by various nations, and then selects as typical the English Virginia
Company, the Dutch West India Company, and the French Company of New
France, which he analyzes and compares with one another. It is
significant that not one of these companies was Spanish, for that
country retained in its own hands complete control both of its colonies
and of their commerce.

Since English colonization was almost wholly Protestant and added a new
centre of Protestant influence, Professor Cheyney has, in two chapters
(ix. and x.), given some account of the Reformation and of the