that proclamation for the persecution of | enlightened policy of her house is most the Christians which made itself felt so unexpectedly shown in her getting such terribly, not only here, but in the far a gift for her city, as well as by the enwestern Isle of Britain, in the death of St. Alban at Verulam; and when St. Augustine came to England one of his earliest foundations at Canterbury was a church dedicated to St. Pancras, the noble Roman youth of fourteen, who had perished by the same cruel edict, and whose father owned the land upon which the missioner's monastery at Rome stood. The sanguinary emperor had the people of this city massacred for resisting him, ordering that the slaughter should continue until their blood stained his horse's knees - mercifully a splash or a stumble fulfilled the letter of this command before they were totally exterminated.

couragement she showed towards the physician Dioscorides, and the computator of the Julian Kalendar, Sosigenes.

It was the kings of Pergamus, who had had to provide this large number of works, who invented the writing upon the less perishable parchment when Ptolemy Epiphanes cut off the supply of papyrus or byblus - necessity proving the mother of a still valued discovery.

We cannot stand upon this Serapeum mound without recalling some of the events which have been connected with it. There will come up to mind the martyrdom of the aged St. Mark the Evangelist about the year A.D. 68, the year when Didymus, the farm-steward, was keeping those accounts upon the back of which has lately been discovered by our British Museum a copy of

It is perhaps impossible to picture to excess the beauty of the temple and courts of the Serapeum. Ammianus Marcellinus says that it exceeded the Capitol of Rome itself in magnificence, one of Aristotle's political constituand we have a particular description of it remaining to us in the works of Ruffinus, who relates its demolition in A.D. 389, when a church and martyrium dedicated to St. John the Baptist were erected upon part of its site (Univ. Hist. xvi. 429; Le Beau, v. 353). The Serapeum extended from this mound over the adjoining Arab cemetery; but beyond this column from the quarries of the first cataract and a few broken shafts, we have to reform the halls and courts of imposing splendor and the magnificence and beauty of their contents from the golden statue of Isis onwards. Attached to this temple was the second great Library of Alexandria, scarcely smaller than the one destroyed by the fire in the time of Julius Caesar. If one answered to our British Museum, the other corresponded to the Oxford Bodleian. In the latter we possess thirty thousand manuscripts and four hundred and twenty-five thousand volumes, but here all were manuscripts, and three hundred thousand of those. The foundation of this great collection was the present of two hundred thousand volumes by Mark Anthony to Cleopatra, in whom the literary and

tions. He was dragged along with feline cruelty from his house afterwards the Cathedral, and now the Quarantine, lying over there-to this spot, amid the excited and maddened mob raging to stamp out the faith of the Nazarene, and perhaps at this spot it was that the venerable patriarch of Egyptian Christianity breathed forth his soul to God. Nor can we forget another whose diminutive form and stooping gait proclaim the great Athanasius. With face of angelic sweetness, and bald head shaded by a cowl, we can picture him as hastening by as he turns up his keen, intelligent eyes to behold the mighty temple, he whose life was a long tragedy," and divided between consecration and death into four exiles and four returns. Who now, save the theologians, reads the tale of that magnificent life, and who ever thinks as he stands upon these sand-heaps, that bebeath them lies the lost part of his Arian history? Both his body and that of St. Mark were carried away by Venetian merchants, as is well known, and now rest in the city of Venice.

Is it unprofitable to reflect here, as we did at the Museum site, that per

Alexandria in the time of the wars of Napoleon, and although the entrance is of course now blocked up, it is a salt and barren waste. It is hard to think of this marshy swamp as a sheet of silvery beauty, with its eight islands set like emeralds upon its broad face, and with its margin waving with Mareotica cortex (Mart., Ep. iv. 42), the oft-named papyrus. The country houses of the wealthy Alexandrian corn-factors and merchants clustered about it. The Arva mareotica (Ov., Met. ix. 73) were famous; in one of these farms the steward whose pages are backed by the Aristotelian work mentioned above kept those accounts ; its oliveyards are often spoken of, and the white grapes of its vineyards produced the favorite beverage of Cleopatra, and of which both Horace (Od. i. 37) and Virgil (Geor. ii. 91) sing. "Mareotic luxury" was a rival to Sybaris in proverb, while the only form now presentable is that of its shooting

chance amidst the books of this Sera- | fresh until the British admitted the sea peum, when it became a Christian in order to flood the country around temple, may have existed some of the works of St. Peter, who had sent St. Mark here, and came himself likewise, if it be accepted that the Babylon he mentioned in his general Epistle (i., v. 13) is Old Cairo ? We still miss his Revelations, Acts and Gospel, and his sermons on judgment and preaching, mentioned by St. Jerome, Eusebius, Clemens of Alexandria, etc. There is within our British Museum, a codex of the whole Bible written in Greek, here in this city, by a noble Egyptian convert, it is thought, named Thecla, about the time that this Serapeum became a Christian church. It was sent by an old patriarch of the city to Charles I., and has in it the epistles of that fourth pope of Rome, St. Clement, "whose name is written in the Book of Life," setting in order the discipline of the Church of Corinth, and of the second of which epistles this codex is the only extant manuscript copy. We have yet to recover a copy of the epistle of Lao-to the sportsman. We are told of two dicea (Coloss. iv. 16), a third Epistle to Corinth of St. Paul (1 Cor. v. 9), a second to Ephesus (Eph. iii. 3), and a third to Thessalonica; and since great quantities of books from here were taken chiefly to Constantinople at the imperial establishment of that city, it may be that whenever science can get a look at the treasury of the sultan, they may still be there, as well as other priceless historic documents long lost to view. The final destruction of the Serapeum Library is that often-disputed but well-known act attributed to the Arab conqueror in the seventh century, who is said to have heated the city baths for six months from its shelves in accordance with the orders of the caliph that, if the books added to the teaching of the Koran they were bad, and if they repeated it they were superfluous.

Just across the ridge of rock and sand which, rising, separates it from the blue and dancing waters of the Mediterranean is the once beautiful Lake of Moris, a deep cutting made by an ancient king to store up the overflow of the beneficent Nile. Its water was

pyramids that once stood in its midst bearing upon their summits two thrones on which were seated colossal statues of Moris and his wife, and which rose three hundred feet above the lapping waters at their base; but of these no sign remains.

A few years ago the favorite drive of visitors was to see the obelisks known as "Cleopatra's Needles," but now both of them have gone; they stood before the palace or Sebasteum whose site a stonemason's yard and Ramleh station probably occupy, and the connection of them with the notorious queen is now quite exploded. No one who has stood beside that one still mercifully left at On can but feel anger and regret that they should have been removed to lands where no surrounding is in keeping, and where their rapid destruction is certain; that remaining where those once at Alexandria came from still serves to mark the spot where the great temple stood, and makes one dream dreams of what scenes and persons in the world's story it must have looked down upon, from earlier days than

had never attained might well be taken as patroness of Girton. One cannot but feel a regard for the simplehearted father who, having himself so strong a sense of the omnipresence of God, thought that it only needed to constantly recall the fact to men's minds to keep them from evil, and therefore urged the civil magistrates to have written at every street corner "God sees thee, O sinner! " One cannot but think that so reverent a philosopher must have brought up Hypatia to share that reverence too. All unite, indeed, in praising her virtue and beauty, and even a gaitered bishop was so enamoured of her that he had to write to his brother and ask him to salute in his stead he is no more precise—"the

those when Joseph the Patriarch came | been president of the School of Matheto wed the daughter of the priest here, matics, and who had trained his daughto even later than when its shadow ter to soar to heights which he himself must have fallen upon another Joseph and Mary his wife, bearing the child Jesus as they came to its fountain for water. Those at Alexandria had been removed before that great advent; but it would have been far more "scientific," and shown far better taste, to have sent them back for future ages to value on their original sites than to have taken them to lands where they must rapidly crumble to dust. There can be no possible excuse made with that gone to New York; the only palliative with regard to ours on the Embankment is the forgotten fact that it was presented by the Egyptian government to commemorate our triumphs over France. That at New York is now almost smooth, its inscriptions obliterated, as that on the Thames most honored and most beloved of God, bank will be in another twenty years. the philosopher," and talks of her Trieste laid some claim to the Amer- "divine voice" and "sacred hand." ican one. Its erector, as that of the It cannot be said that the Church did one on the Embankment, was Thothmes not appreciate her, as is sometimes asthe Third, about thirty-five hundred sumed. A frenzied band of dervishes, years ago, and, like all the rest of them, such as this land still produces in the it once had its surface highly polished religion of Mahomet, but then nomiand the hieroglyphics perhaps inlaid ually Christian, thought they were with silver-gilt, and its point capped doing God service by their demon's with the same metal. As it rose sev-deed, and the form of one of that God's enty feet in air, its apex caught the first most beautiful works lay mangled with glance of the sun-god Ra as he rose oyster-shells at the base of these obeover the Arabian desert, and then the lisks. smooth sides would glitter, and from obelisk to obelisk would the bright glances flash as he rose in the imperial glory and autocracy of his Eastern rule. Think of this, and then look at those sad, wasted, crumbling monuments in London or New York, and answer if wisdom be justified in such ruthless and greedy children as possess them. There was a scene which took place at their feet as they stood before the palace pylon of Alexandria which all know but few associate with them, and yet the sadly thrilling tale of the death of Hypatia is familiar enough. The beautiful daughter of Theon an old man who had

Such are some of the chief memories which must recur to the thoughtful visitor to Alexandria. All up the Nile you will be able to trace the effect of its Ptolemeian rulers; from Dendera's temple which bears the relief, and only existing representation, of Cleopatra, the last of them, up to Pharaoh's bed in beautiful Philæ. Like our own modern Gothic work its chief fault lies in its soullessness; it was a copy of the work of earnest hands by faithless imitators; but here in Alexandria we may believe that Greece built true to her own traditions, and remained true to her own style. All its glory lasted only about four hundred years, for it arose in transition times, days of mental, spiritual and political disturbance. Chris

unknown or disregarded by them, or which has since acquired a new value. This is notably the case with the arsenical pyrites, or mundic, turned out in vast quantities from the copper mines in Devon and Cornwall, principally on both banks of the Tamar. At one time, these mines, rich in copper, were worked vigorously for that metal, and the mundic was cast away, forming enormous "ramps," as they are locally termed, or mounds of this waste. After a while the price of copper declined and the richness of the lodes became less.

tianity, which was the birth of the individual conscience, was about to arise; Greek thought had been in the throes of labor since the days of Plato, who in his "Republic" had endeavored to regain it to the quiet assurance which hitherto had satisfied it that the ons was the Church of God, and that its voice was infallibly true. Free thought was breaking up this contentment. Rome was rising to outstrip Greece, and the waves of popular contention were arising into storm. And thus faded away this lovely and wondrous city, whose arts and wealth had surpassed Simultaneously a demand sprang up for any the world had known, whose arsenic, and now the old copper mines schools outshone Heliopolis, and whose are worked, not exclusively but mainly luxury and magnificence vied with any- for arsenic. The cost of production is thing Thebes, or Memphis, or Athens, of course greatly reduced by the fact or Rome ever possessed in their palm- that enormous quantities had been iest days. Proteus still retains his sov-brought up from underground, and had ereignty over Alexandria in a very been thrown out under the previous marked manner. No one who has ever system, and these waste heaps were been here and studied the history of now reworked for the sake of the arthe City of the Waters would doubt the senic. Formerly, "arsenic soot" was correctness of the Homeric locale of sold from half a crown to fifteen shilthat god or king. Diodorus and Lu- lings a ton; now its price ranges from cian and the others all try to explain seven pounds to seven pounds ten shilwhy he was made to embody prophecy lings. and change; but they need only to have had our centuries to look back over to see with our eyes how true the simile was it prophetically incorporated of this city-changeful in aspect, in character, in rulers; changeful in thought, in religion, in learning; old and ever young, young yet ever old, renewing in these days, may we hope, its youth, like the eagles, and finding in Britain the second Alexander to cut the Gordian knot of its difficulties, and speed it through future ages upon its course of peace, prosperity, and glory.

The value of arsenic as something other than a poison or a pigment is of recent discovery. In ancient classic times, the beauty of orpiment, the yellow sulphide, was known, but not realgo, the disulphate of arsenic, which is of a ruby color. Arsenic as a pigment has been, and, we fear, still is, much used in the coloring of wallpapers in fact, Kay's orpiment is such a valuable pigment artistically, that the paper-stainers can hardly do without it, if purchasers will have æsthetic greens and yellows. And here, before proceeding any further with the manufacture of arsenic, the writer desires to place before the reader a certain experience of his own with regard to wall-papers colored with orpiment. Some years ago he went to one of the THE utilization of waste is one of the most noted of firms for æsthetic papers great lessons we are learning at the wherewith to cover the walls of his close of the nineteenth century. What house. A few years after, his children our fathers and grandfathers threw were afflicted with obstinate sores about away, that we find profitable to work the mouth, the wrists, and the ankles. for something it contains which was The village doctor was called in, an

ALFRED E. P. RAYMUND DOWLING.

From Chambers' Journal. THE MANUFACTURE OF ARSENIC.

old-fashioned practitioner, who gave | cent. of arsenic, and from twenty-five doses and prescribed diet, with no good to thirty per cent. of iron. It has a result. Then all at once it occurred to silvery lead look, with yellow stains in the writer to have the wall-papers ana- it where is copper. The first process lyzed. They were found to be charged consists in dividing the copper ore from with arsenic; the gum fastening the the mundic. For this purpose all the color to the paper had yielded, and the rock brought up from the mine is arsenical dust was flying about and broken into pieces of the size of a nut ; lodging everywhere. The children then this, as well as the refuse, is were removed, and recovered. "jigged," that is to say is subjected to shaking in sieves, which let the small particles fall through, and reserve only the nuggets. The small matter is not, however, wasted; it is subjected to washing in "strips," where the water deposits first the mundic, as heaviest, then the copper ore, and lastly the refuse. The refuse, however, is not dismissed till it has been again jigged and washed, so that every particle of copper and of mundic has been saved from it. What passes away is then mere earthy matter.

For

The question naturally arises: Is the manufacture of arsenic prejudicial to the health of the workers? To a certain extent it must be so; but it is not so to anything like the extent that might be supposed. The best means of resisting arsenic is by the use of soap and water. The workmen engaged in the manufacture have their mouths and noses muffled, to prevent their inhaling the dust. They wash and completely change their clothing on leaving work, and they enjoy complete freedom from zymotic diseases, as all germs are killed, The lumps of broken stone cannot be either by the arsenic dust, or by the separated thus easily by water; they sulphurous acid given off by the manu- have to be assorted by hand. facture. The time of greatest mischief this purpose girls are employed, locally is the summer, when the men perspire; called "bâl maidens," from the Cornish then the arsenic adheres, and pro-word "bâl," which signifies a mine. duces sores. Moreover, where there is These girls, five in a row, recline on a wound, if arsenic enters it, it will not sloping shelves of board, with a table heal till the bone has been reached. before them and a trough. On each The best remedy for sores produced by side of the table are three wooden arsenic is fuller's earth. The men be- boxes. With a curved iron tool the lieve that the arsenic produces short- girls rake the stones to them and sort ness of breath and asthma; but this is them, according to color. The yellow really the result of their having to work and "peacock" copper is thrown into all day with their noses and mouth cov- the trough under their noses. The ered by woollen mufflers. mundic is tossed adroitly into the nearest box on right or left; the "elvan," or inferior, into the second; and the rubbish into the third.

Let us now look at the manufacture, and for that purpose we will take the Devon Great Consols Mine, where the largest amount of arsenic is made. Before the table flows a stream of This occupies a tongue of land about water. The stones are brought in barwhich the river Tamar forms a loop. rows from the jiggers, and are tipped It is completely barren on its top, all into the water. Then a young man vegetation being killed by the fumes of with a fork dips them out and throws sulphurous acid. The mine was worked them upon the table, and so continufor copper between 1844 and 1862 with ally supplies the bâl maidens with mawonderful results. The lode was thirty terial for selection. The boxes have feet wide, and ran for a mile. After to be examined by the overlooker, that, it gave out, and has been worked to make sure that the girls have not mainly for arsenic since 1874.

Arsenical mundic contains twelve and a half to seventeen

been careless and have thrown away from good stuff. Then the copper ore is persent away to Wales to be smelted. As