British Museum, which, through the politeness of Mr. R. H. Major, I had the pleasure of inspecting in 1874. It embraces treatises on history, astronomy, geography, religion, morality, astrology, and other subjects. From one of these books, compiled after the manner of our modern encyclopædias, and the compilation of which is shown to have been made more than 2,000 years b. c., it has been ascertained, what has long been supposed, that Chaldea was the parent-land of astronomy; for it is found, from this compilation and from other bricks, that the Babylonians catalogued the stars, and distinguished and named the constellations; that they arranged the twelve constellations that form our present zodiac to show the course of the sun's path in the heavens; divided time into weeks, months, and years; that they divided the week, as we now have it, into seven days, six being days of labor and the seventh a day of rest, to which they gave a name from which we have derived our word "sabbath," and which day, as a day of rest from all labor of every kind, they observed as rigorously as the Jew or the Puritan. The motion of the heavenly bodies and the phenomena of the weather were noted down, and a connection, as I have before stated, detected, as M. de Perville claims to have discovered, between the weather and the changes of the moon. They invented the sun-dial to mark the movements of the heavenly bodies, the waterclock to measure time, and they speak in this work of the spots on the sun, a fact they could only have known by the aid of telescopes, which it is supposed they possessed, from observations that they have noted down of the rising of Venus and the fact that Layard found a crystal lens in the ruins of Nineveh. These "bricks" contain an account of the deluge, substantially the same as the narrative in the Bible, except that the names are different. They disclose that houses and land were then sold, leased, and mortgaged, that money was loaned at interest, and that the market-gardeners, to use an American phrase, "worked on shares"; that the farmer, when plowing with his oxen, beguiled his labor with short and homely songs, two of which have been found; and, to connect this very remote civilization with the usages of to-day, I may, in conclusion, refer to one of the bricks of this library, in the form of a notice, which is to the effect that visitors are requested to give to the librarian the number of the book they wish to consult, and that it will be brought to them; at the perusal of which one is disposed to fall back upon the exclamation of Solomon, that there is nothing new under the sun.
A very curious fact has come to light, resulting from Dr. Schliemann's discoveries in the Troad. In the lowest strata of his excavations at Hissarlik he found a vase with an inscription in an unknown language. Six years ago, the eminent Orientalist, E. Burnouf, declared the inscription to be in Chinese characters, for which he was generally laughed at at the time, from the improbability of Dr. Schliemann finding, in the lowest strata of his excavations, a vase with an inscription
