Most of the bassi rilievi, and nearly all the characteristic features of architecture in the various monuments at Athens, have been moulded, and the moulds of them brought to London. Besides the architecture and sculpture at Athens, all similar remains which could be traced through several parts of Greece have been measured and delineated with the most scrupulous exactness, by the second architect Ittar. In the prosecution of this undertaking, the artists had the mortification of witnessing the very _willful devastation to which all the sculpture, and even the architecture, were daily exposed on the part of the Turks and travelers_: the former equally influenced by mischief and by avarice, the latter from an anxiety to become possessed, each according to his means, of some relic, however small, of buildings or statues which had formed the pride of Greece. The Ionic temple on the Ilyssus which, in Stuart's time, about the year 1759, was in tolerable preservation, had so entirely disappeared, that its foundation was no longer to be ascertained. Another temple near Olympia had shared a similar fate within the recollection of many. The temple of Minerva had been converted into a powder magazine, and was in great part shattered from a shell falling upon it during the bombardment of Athens by the Venetians, towards the end of the seventeenth century; and even this accident has not deterred the Turks from applying the beautiful temple of Neptune and Erectheus to the same use, whereby it is still constantly exposed to a similar fate. Many of the statues over the entrance of the temple of Minerva, which had been thrown down by the explosion, had been powdered to mortar, because they offered the whitest marble within reach; and parts of the modern fortification, and the miserable houses where this mortar had been so applied, are easily traced. In addition to these causes of degradation, the Turks will frequently climb up the ruined walls and amuse themselves in defacing any sculpture they can reach; or in breaking columns, statues, or other remains of antiquity, in the fond expectation of finding within them some hidden treasures.