ABDUL HAMID AND JOHN BULL.

"I've such a high regard for you, dear Mr. Bull! Won't you give me your photograph?

[According to a communication from Turkish official circles, the Porte professes the highest regard for the British nation, which. with touching consideration, it refuses to associate with certain English politicians led astray by their passion, and the perpetrators the sensational and ignominious pictures" which have given such a painfully wrong impression of Abdul the Benevolent. Mem. -The German Ambassador presented the portrait of the German Royal family to the Sultan after the recent massacres.]

of

From Picture Politics (London).

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IX years ago the plan of the " Polychrome " Bible was first announced, although some years must have been consumed in perfecting that plan. The originator of the idea, we might call him the general of the scholarly forces, was F'rofessor Paul Haupt of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Professor Haupt was but thirty-two years of age then, but to the scholarly world appeared to be much older, for he had already accomplished a very large amount of research covering a very broad field of endeavor. Born in Görlitz (Germany), November 25, 1858, he received a thorough Gerinan educa tion, attending the Görlitz Gymnasium, the 'Universities at Leipzig and Berlin at a very early age. It was by accident that he entered the class of Profes sor Friedrich Delitzch, then teaching the comparatively new branch of Assyriology. The lecture hour happened to come just at such a time as Student Haupt wished to have a lecture. He was at once interested in this work, and in the course of a week had mastered all of the signs then known which go to make up the Assyrian alphabet. There were probably two hundred or more, as we have now nearly four hundred, but the task of learning them is by no means an easy one. Professor Franz Delitzch was his teacher in Hebrew, and he studied Arabic under the late Professor Fleischer, the most renowned of Arabic scholars, whose denomination of that language as the Devil's own tongue" was impressive, and, what is more to the point, very near the truth, if we are to judge by its difficulties. Professor Dillmann taught him Ethiopic; and for Rabbin ical Hebrew as found in the Talmud he went to the local rabbis. At the same time he received a thorough classical and philosophic education.

In 1880 he became privat-docent (tutor) at the University of Göttingen, teaching Assyrian and other Semitic tongues. Meanwhile he had been engaged in original investigations, which resulted in the publication then and later of transcriptions from the clay tablets (on which the Cuneiform inscriptions are found). These were "Accadian and Sumerian Cuneiform Texts," the "Babylonian Nimrod. Epic," which contains the account of Creation and the Deluge, resembling the accounts of the same events in the Old Testament in many respects, and the "Sumerian Family-Laws," containing many valuable philological and grammatical discoveries. In 1883 Professor Haupt, though but twenty-five years of age, became Professor of Semitics in Johns Hopkins, retaining his connection with the Univer sity of Göttingen until 1889, as "Extraordinary Professor of Assyrian." He has edited the "Beiträge sur Assyriologie" ("Contributions to Assyri

nyms is often confounding to more careless natives of America.

Possessed of a magnetic personality, he draws his students about him by the force of his thoroughness and unaffectedness. His classes can hardly be termed such in the usual acceptation of this word. They are more like literary clubs, of which he is president and inspirer. That his work is effective is best proven by the young men in whom he has planted a love, for thorough work. Such men as Professor Cyrus Adler of the Smithsonian, Washington; Dr B. W. Bacon, the author of the "Genesis of Genesis; " Professor Prince of the University of New York, and many others demonstrate the power which he exerts over his pupils.

we may

In the picture of the "Semitic Seminary see Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests and Protestant clergymen grouped about him as a leader into rich fields of knowledge and the enjoyment of its pursuit. By his tactful guidance all theologics are for the moment put aside, and his students become coworkers in the development of the truth as they can find it. The relation of superior and inferior does not hold of Professor Haupt and his disciples, save as they reverence his scholarship and are happy to claim his friendship. But our task is to present something regarding the Bible issuing now under his direction, and this personal excursus is to be excused only upon the ground that it may interest us more deeply in that Bible when we know that its editor is a man of deep learning, broad sympathies and young enough to give both enthusiasm and labor to whatever he undertakes. Whether the germ of this very original idea of a critical Bible was already at work before he came to America, or only developed later, is not easy even for him to say. For which one of us can trace any idea to the exact moment of its conception? No matter when

the thought took shape and form, it was an answer to a crying necessity felt in two quarters. The "King James Version" is three hundred years old, filled with mistranslations, obsolete words and incomprehensible Hebraisms. While in its preface addressed to the "very vulgar," it has ceased to be accessible to the masses. The "heathens" receiving late translations are better able to understand the Bible because these translations are intelligible to them. The "Revised Version," lately produced, has not removed these obstacles, controlled as it was by English conservatism. The cry has gone up from all sides for a " Bible that we can understand" without dictionary and glossary. The new version was designed, primarily, to meet this reasonable demand.

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There was another cry, equally insistent, if not so general, for an understanding of the critical theories about the Bible: "What are the critics trying to do?" And the "Polychrome Bible" seeks to answer this question fully and fairly. Here are in numerable volumes lumbering the topmost shelves of our great libraries, to be swept of their perpetual