Excerpt from History of Europe, Ancient and Medieval: Earliest Man, the Orient, Greece and RomeThese volumes are based on the authors "Outlines of European History," but Chapters I-XX have been completely rewritten, simplified, and condensed; and more space has been given to Roman history and less to that of the ancient Orient. Hearty thanks are due to Dr. T. G. Allen and Professor Carl F. Huth for reading the proofs of this portion and for revising the bibliographies. As for the rest of the work, much condensation has been effected and the details of presentation have been reconsidered from beginning to end.Not only have the illustrations been carefully chosen with a view of corroborating and vivifying the text but under each picture a sufficiently detailed legend is given to explain its significance, and this often adds materially to the information given in the letterpress. The pictures consequently give a sort of. parallel narrative and furnish a helpful supplement and corrective to the text itself. Everything which does not obviously bear upon the chief matters under consideration is sedulously excluded. (See "Outlines of European History," Part I, p. v, for acknowledgments of the authors in this important matter.)These volumes meet the growing demand for a two-year course in European history in the earlier years of the high school and in the preparatory schools. The great achievements of the oriental peoples and of the Greek and Roman periods are brought into immediate relation with later European development, without devoting a whole years study to them. English history, if somewhat briefly treated, is given its proper association with that of the neighboring nations on the Continent. By devoting the whole second year to the history of the tremendous changes which have overtaken the world since the middle of the eighteenth century, the student will be in a position to grasp the more immediate causes of the World War and the perplexing…