While the Roman _Instituto_ was thus devoting itself to research, and assuring to its members the advantages of a regular publicity, these inquiries were daily attracting a more considerable share of attention from the other learned bodies of Europe. The _Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles Lettres_, the Academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, devoted an ever-increasing portion of their programmes to such studies. Men began everywhere to understand that the writings of the classic authors, which had been so exhaustively studied ever since the Renaissance, were no longer capable of affording fresh information. In order to learn more of antiquity than the great scholars of the last three centuries, it was necessary to penetrate into the past by paths as yet unexplored; it was necessary to complement and control the evidence of classic authors by that of public and private inscriptions, engraved upon bronze, marble, or stone; it was above all necessary to seek for the expression, in their handiwork, of the wants and ideas, of the personal sentiments and religious conceptions, of the men of antiquity. There are, in fact, nations, such as the Etruscans, whose whole literature has perished, who are only known to us by the relics of their art. Others, like the Greeks and Latins, have indeed transmitted to us noble masterpieces of literature; but these masterpieces are few in proportion to those which time has destroyed. Of the thoughts which they expressed in their immortal languages, too many have been lost for ever with the fragile strips of papyrus to which they were confided. With the ardour for knowledge and the heroic perseverance which are among the virtues of our time, curiosity has refused to resign itself to such a loss. It has determined to discover the unpublished, to draw into the light all that has not perished beyond recovery, to collect all that the spirit of antiquity has left behind it, either upon works hitherto unnoticed, or upon those which have been imperfectly understood. The treasures of epigraphy have been classified and shown in their full value by Bœckh, Borghesi, and others, and the world is now able to guess all that history may owe to them. The study, however, of those remains which bear figured representations is still more complex and formidable. The language of forms is, in itself, less definite than that of words, and it becomes very difficult to decipher when we have no words dealing with the same ideas to help us, when we possess the art of a people without a line of their literature. Another difficulty springs from the very abundance and variety of the materials to our hand. We feel oppressed by the ever-growing accumulation of facts, and can neither determine where to begin our work, nor how to leave it off: we cannot see the forest for the trees! II.