later. The amphitheatre, though large and in some respects remarkable, looks small in comparison to those of Rome and Capua. The theatre, on the other hand, is a first-rate work of art, in its way; and, I believe, the largest in the world. It was called, if I mistake not, by Cicero, the Circus Maximus, and is 116 feet in diameter, being a little more than a semicircle. Both it and the amphitheatre are excavated out of the solid rock. Fragments of aqueducts, run dry for ages, tombs, and cenotaphs raised to perpetuate the memory of men long since forgotten, besides piles of ruins of nameless edifices, and numberless excavations in the rocks, for unknown purposes, over miles of area, give ample evidence of the extent of the city, now shrunk into a petty town at a remote angle of the former capital.

Perhaps, however, the most striking proofs of the magnitude of the old city of Syracuse, are the enormous quarries from which the stone had been hewn in past ages, to construct the houses and temples, the dwellings and places of amusement of the million inhabitants whom history tells us resided within the walls. One of these quarries, which is now the garden of the Capuchin convent, we examined minutely. It is a deep, wall-sided, irregular-shaped cut in the rock, said to be one hundred feet deep. At some places this

huge excavation is a hundred yards broad, at others it is contracted to a tenth part of that width. The ground at the bottom is not level, but rises and falls according, I imagine, as the piles of rubbish were moved hither and thither by the workmen. It is everywhere covered either with vegetables, or with flower-beds, either under the spade of the gardener, or thickly grown up with orange-trees, olives, limes, and figs, some of them absolutely like forest-trees; besides almonds, vines, pomegranates, and other trees, and flowering shrubs, all luxuriating in the shelter of this singular excavation. The sides at most places are richly clad with a matting of ivy, it is difficult to tell how thick, which occasionally hangs down like a curtain, in front of enormous caverns, receding far back into the living rock. The Principal of the convent, greatly pleased with our raptures, showed us over his garden, and was evidently flattered by our saying we had seen nothing in the world so like what we read of in the Arabian Nights.

In another quarry of still vaster dimensions, we visited the celebrated Ear of Dionysius, where the echo is certainly very wonderful; a pistol was fired near the mouth, while we stood at the inner end of the cave, and I counted the reverberations for twenty seconds. I feel it difficult to describe the solemn effect of this sound, which more nearly re

sembled a peal of thunder, at a short distance, than anything else, but divested of the abrupt, startling, rattling sort of harsh sound, which belongs to thunder. On the contrary, though very loud, the report of a pistol fired in Dionysius's Ear was rather of a soft sound, even from the first, becoming more and more mellow at every repercussion of the air.

In most of these quarries the marks of the workmen's tools are very apparent. It is even possible to tell the size and shape of many of the stones which have been cut out, and sometimes to follow the order in which they were removed. These trivial, but distinct and indubitable traces of the handiwork of the ancients carry with them, it strikes me, a peculiar sort of authenticity and unpretending truth, which bring old times more vividly before our minds than the great works of art do. For it may be almost said that the statues and temples belong to a different and higher order of beings, with whom we moderns have little resemblance. When we lose ourselves in admiration of the Venus, or the Apollo, or stand awe-struck before the Temple of Neptune at Pæstum, it is almost as difficult to bring the imagination up to the belief that we are of the same race with the men who executed these works, as it is when looking at the planet Jupiter, or at the ring of Saturn, to conceive that these stupendous bodies form an

actual part of the same system to which we pigmies belong. We know by history in the one case, and by scientific demonstrations in the other, that it must be so, but it is difficult to take it all in. But the simple touch of a pickaxe on the face of the rock, in an old quarry like that of Syracuse, tells quite a different story, and one which none can doubt. We almost hear the sound ring in our ears, and half wonder that we do not see the crowds of Greek or Roman workmen labouring round about us. I remember feeling something akin to what I experienced in the caves of Syracuse, when walking alone through the streets of Pompeii, and looking into the houses and shops of our predecessors, by seventeen centuries or so, but different in no material respect from men and women of the present day.

WALES-ROME-EDINBURGH, AND MELROSE.

I HAVE all my life felt a singular delight in visiting quarries, whether old or recent, abandoned or in work, provided only they were so extensive, as to afford either an insight, geologically speaking, into the structure of the world, or a sort of picture, historically speaking, of the busy workings of man. I am therefore tempted, while treating of the gigan tic quarries of Syracuse, to digress a little to one or two other scenes of equal, or even, in some respects, superior interest. Of these I might well place the first order of importance, the celebrated gypsum quarries of Montmartre, near Paris, which are curious not merely from their vast extent and singularity of shape, but in a much higher degree from their furnishing the greatest library, as it were, of natural history which the genius and industry of man has yet given to the perusal of the world. The celebrated Cuvier and his distinguished