Man and nature in the Renaissance

doubts. Such a revision, taking into account also the studies of Friedenwald and S. W. Baron, would still have great value. One disturbing feature of this reprint is its cavalier attitude to the classical languages. The Greek is transliterated in a modem Greek phonetic transcription, thereby making it almost unintelligible even to classicists, especially as printing and copying errors here abound. Both Greek and Latin, both as unknown to the readership as Preuss's German, are often left untranslated, and, when a version is given, it is either printed without distinguishing marks or, far too often, inaccurate: e.g. p. 1 1, n. 1 "each doctor deals with a single disease", not, as Rosner, "for every disease there is one physician"; p. 499, "because of the size of his unmentionable organ", not "because of his obscene size". Both translator and publisher could have saved themselves space and done honour to Preuss's considerable philological scholarship if they had removed completely all the Greek and Latin and replaced them with accurate versions. As it is, the reader is frequently faced with words as perplexing as the disease which killed King Asa.