dedicated to St. Augustine, at whose suggestion the task was undertaken. The gentiles of this age were wont to complain that the dishonour and ruin which had so long threatened the empire, and which had at length been consummated in the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths, must be ascribed to the wrath of the ancient deities, whose worship had been abandoned and whose altars had been profaned by the votaries of the new faith. In order to silence their clamour Orosius, upon his return from Palestine, composed this history to demonstrate that from the earliest epoch the world had been the scene of crimes not less revolting, and that men had groaned under calamities still more intolerable from war, pestilence, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the fury of the elements, while they could look forward to no happiness in a future state to console them for their miseries in the present. The annals, which extend from the Creation down to the year A. D. 417, are, with exception of the concluding portion, extracted from Justin, Eutropius and inferior second-hand authorities, whose statements are rashly admitted and unskilfully combined, without any attempt to investigate the basis upon which they rest, or to reconcile their contradictions and inconsistencies. Although such a compilation might be held in high esteem in the fifth century, and might command the applause of the ecclesiastical biographers from Gennadius downwards, and even of some scholars of a later date, its defects could not escape the keen discernment of Sigonius, Lipsius, and Casaubon, who soon perceived that no original sources of information had been consulted, that the Greek writers had been altogether neglected, either through ignorance or indifference, and that the whole narrative so abounded with gross errors in facts and in chronology as to be almost totally destitute of utility, since no dependence can be placed on the accuracy of those representations which refer to events not elsewhere chronicled. The style which has been pronounced by sonic impartial critics not devoid of elegance, is evidently formed upon the two great models of the Ciristian eloquence of Africa, Tertullian and Cyprian. Among the various titles exhibitet by the MSS., such as, and the like, one, which has proved a most puzzling enigma, appears under the varying forms, Hormesta, or Ormesta, or Ormista, sometimes with the addition, id est miseriarum Christiani temporis. Among a multitude of solutions, mIany of them altogether ridiculous, the most plausible is that which adoptillg Ormista as the true orthography supposes it to be a compound of Or. m. ist.--an abbreviation for Orosii mundi historia.

written ten in Palestine, A. D. 415. Orosius, having been anathematised by John of Jerusalem as one who maintained that man could not, even by the aid of OGod, fulfil the divine law, published this tract with the double object of proving the injustice of the charge and of defending his own proceedings by demonstrating the fatal tendency of the tenets inculcated by Pelagius. By some oversight on the part of a transcriber, seventeen chapters of the , by Augustine, have been inserted in this piece, a mistake which has led to no small confusion.

The earliest of the works of Orosius, composed soon after his first arrival in Africa, for the purpose of explaining the state of religious parties in Spain, especially in reference to the commotions excited by the Priscillianists cillianists and Origenists. It is usually attached to the reply, by Augustine, entitled vol. viii. ed. Boned.

Some appear to have been at one time in existence, but are now lost.

found among the works of Augustine.

printed along with at Paris, in 1533.

attributed by Trithemius to Orosius, but in reality belonging to Honorius Augustodunelsis.

mentioned by Trithemius, supposed by many to be a spurious treatise, is in reality the under a different title.