In November, 1912, a carpenter, searching amongst the débris which had been precipitated from the top of a hill overlooking the country district of Magrè into the limestone quarries at its foot, discovered a fragment of a lead pig and four pieces of stagshorn with short inscriptions in an early Italic alphabet. The find was in due course reported to the officials in charge of antiquities coming to light in the province in which Magrè is situated, and careful excavations were made during the same month, resulting in the discovery of the other inscribed fragments of horn, which, with the four first found, form the subject of this article. These objects are now preserved in the Museo Nazionale at Este, where, at the suggestion of Professor R. S. Conway, I examined them at the end of March, 1922, and made a transcript of the text, which, it is expected, will later be published in Part II of Professor Conway's forthcoming Pre-Italic Dialects of Italy.

In a paper published in the 1917 volume of this Journal, pp. 59 ff., I attempted to make available for the general student the results of some recent research on coins. The present paper is designed to continue the task thus begun. It follows the same plan and is subject to the same restrictions. General principles are stressed, while for details reference is made to the special publications noted on pp. 263, 264. Only the imperial issues, not the purely local or provincial, are considered.

Among the monuments erected by Augustus at Rome were two obelisks, about which the elder Pliny gives fairly full information. They had originally been erected in Egypt by two different monarchs, and, when Augustus had them transported to Rome, the one was placed in the Circus Maximus, the other in the Campus Martius. Moreover, the latter was put to practical use by being an essential part of the large solarium erected by the Emperor. Somewhat earlier in the same book Pliny attributes the setting up of the first obelisk to Mespheres at Heliopolis. The king had been warned to do this in a dream. In his chapter on obelisks Isidore also attributes the institution of this form of monument to this king, whom he calls Mesfres. He further gives more precise reasons for the dedication, and then passes on to the obelisk in the middle of the Circus; though his description is somewhat obscure, it is implied that the obelisk was used for a sun-dial. This passage from Isidore is reproduced in the Liber Glossarum, together with a sentence which is not in the MSS. of Isidore, and which occurs between sections 1 and 2 of the chapter in question:– ‘unum quippe fecit pedibus septuaginta quinque, alterum septuaginta sex quos Augustus ab ultima Aegypto deportatos alterum ex his Circo, alterum in Campo Martio posuit.’

A good many years ago Dircken wrote a short paper with the object of tracing the sources in those parts of the Etymologiae in which Isidore deals with laws or legal terms. He pointed out that, while it could be shown that the ultimate source of Isidore's information was the writings of Gaius, Ulpian or Julius Paulus, it could not be maintained that Isidore himself was directly acquainted with the great jurists of the second and third centuries.