but little obliteration of the paintings, is found. When injury has been sustained from natural causes, it has been produced by other physical agencies than those of moisture: the sand has sometimes done its work of destruction. Thus, among the ruins of Alexandria, an obelisk is still standing, which, on its north and east faces, retains much of the freshness and sharpness of its original chiselling; while on the other two sides, the sands of the desert, which have been beating against them for several hundred years, have partially, effaced the inscriptions. In any other country than Egypt, the whole would, probably, long since have been destroyed. A few years ago, the French transported an obelisk from Luxor, and raised it in Paris; and though the material is granite, and though for many centuries it had stood uninjured in its original position; yet it has already been found necessary to cover it with a liquid preparation of caoutchouc, to protect it from the corrosive effects of the atmosphere in Paris.

There are temples in Egypt which have been roofless for 2,000 years; their walls are covered with paintings. The colors are still distinctly perceptible, and in many instances, retain all their original freshness. It is not strange, then, that the sculptured stone should remain, often with the polish undimmed that it received from the hands of the workmen, many hundreds of years ago. Such is at this moment the case with fragments of temples, the demolition of which falls within the historic period, as it is known they were destroyed by Cambyses, 500 years before the Christian era. The same freshness, the same strange union of seeming youth with acknowledged age, is also to be seen in some of the cavern temples and tombs, excavated in the sides of the mountains. At Aboo-simbul, in Nubia, the white of the walls is unstained