LAYARD. Alexander the Great, after he had transferred his seat of empire to the East, so fully appreciated the importance of those great works that he ordered them to be cleansed and repaired, and superintended the work in person, steering his boat with his own hand through the channels. Similar operations undertaken now would again restore to Mesopotamia its old fertility, and fit Babylon, not only for regaining her place as the emporium of the Eastern world, but for becoming the great entrepot of commerce between the West and East, which will ere long, in consequence of the introduction of railways, again flow into its old overland route by Palmyra, through the deserts, from the Levant to the head of the Persian Gulf. Footnote 147: Ctesias and other writers speak of the Bactrian and Indian expedition of Ninus and Semiramis; and in connection with this it is important to notice, that upon the obelisk discovered at Nimroud—which belongs to the period of the earliest palace, having been erected by the son of the founder of that building—are represented the Bactrian camel, the elephant, and the rhinoceros—(all animals from India and Central Asia)—brought as tribute by a conquered people to the Assyrian king. Footnote 148: The Hon. James Thomason, late Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, who lingered too long in India, chiefly in the hope to have been present on the occasion above commemorated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES ● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● The caret (^) serves as a superscript indicator, applicable to individual characters (like 2^d) and even entire phrases (like 1^{st}).