vation of one hundred and ninety-eight feet, and on its summit is a solid pile of brick thirty-seven feet high by twenty-eight in breadth, diminishing in thickness to the top, which is broken and irregular, and rent by a large fissure extending through a third of its height. It is perforated by small square holes disposed in rhomboids. The fine burnt bricks of which it is built have inscriptions on them; and so admirable is the cement, which appears to be lime-mortar, that, though the layers are so close together that it is difficult to discern what sub stance is between them, it is nearly impossible to extract one of the bricks whole. The other parts of the summit of this hill are occupied by immense fragments of brickwork of no determinate figure, tumbled together and con verted into solid vitrified masses, as if they had undergone the action of the fiercest fire or been blown up with gunpowder, the layers of the bricks being perfectly dis cernible,- -a curious fact, and one for which I am utterly incapable of accounting. These, incredible as it may seem, are actually the ruins spoken of by Père Emanuel, who takes no sort of notice of the prodigious mound on which they are elevated.

"It is almost needless to observe that the whole of this mound is itself a ruin, channelled by the weather and strewed with the usual fragments, and with pieces of black stone, sand-stone, and marble. In the eastern part layers of unburnt brick are plainly to be seen, but no reeds were discernible in any part: possibly the absence of them here, when they are so generally seen under similar cir cumstances, may be an argument of the superior antiquity of the ruin. In the north side may be seen traces of building exactly similar to the brick-pile. At the foot of the mound a step may be traced, scarcely elevated above the plain, exceeding in extent by several feet each way the true or measured base; and there is a quad. rangular inclosure round the whole, as at the Mujelibè,

but much more perfect and of greater dimensions. At a trifling distance from the Birs, and parallel with its eastern face, is a mound not inferior to that of the Kasr in elevation, but much longer than it is broad. On the top of it are two Koubbès or oratories, one called Makam Ibrahim Khalil, and said to be the place where Ibrahim was thrown into the fire by order of Nimroud, who surveyed the scene from the Birs; the other, which is in ruins, Makam Saheb Zeman; but to what part of Mehdy's life it relates I am ignorant. In the oratories I searched in vain for the inscriptions mentioned by Niebuhr; near that of Ibrahim Khalil is a small excavation into the mound, which merits no attention; but the mound itself is curious from its position, and correspond ence with others."

Mr. Rich subsequently made the ruins of ancient Babylon the objects of a most careful and minute investigation and to his descriptions we owe the most full and trustworthy accounts which we possess of the ruined capital of Nimrod's Empire. He conceives the mound still remaining on the eastern side of the Birs Nimroud to have been a building of great dimensions, and most probably a temple attached to the tower of Belus. The same form of mound has been observed, similarly situated, attached to other ruins which bear a considerable resemblance to the pyramidal tower of Birs, so that it seems reasonable to conclude that these are the relics of the vast temples once devoted to the rites of that long extinct and forgotten faith. From the general appearance of the ruin, Mr. Rich infers that it was a pyramidal erection, built in several stages gradually diminishing to the summit, and corresponding to the great pyramids of Mexico, which some ingenious theorists have conceived to furnish evidence of the early correspondence of the two races. Such speculations, however, are extremely fallacious, similarity of climate and materials will produce a corres