Confederation of the Rhine, with whose dominions Frankfort had been incorporated by Napoleon. From 1816 to 1866 it was the seat of the German federal diet. It is now annexed to the principal post office (built 1892-1894), which lies close to it on the Zeil. The Saalhof, built on the site of the palace erected by Louis the Pious in 822, overlooking the Main, has a chapel of the 12th century, the substructure dating from Carolingian times. This is the oldest building in Frankfort. The facade of the Saalhof in the Saalgasse dates from 1604, the southern wing with the two gables from 1715 to 1717. Of numerous other medieval buildings may be mentioned the Leinwandhaus (linendrapers' hall), a 15th century building reconstructed in 1892 as a municipal museum. In the Grosser Hirschgraben is the Goethehaus, a 16th century building which came into the possession of the Goethe family in 1733. Here Goethe lived from his birth in 1749 until 1775. In 1863 the house was acquired by the _Freies deutsche Hochstift_ and was opened to the public. It has been restored, from Goethe's account of it in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, as nearly as possible to its condition in the poet's day, and is now connected with a Goethemuseum (1897), with archives and a library of 25,000 volumes representative of the Goethe period of German literature. _Literary and Scientific Institutions._--Few cities of the same size as Frankfort are so richly endowed with literary, scientific and artistic institutions, or possess so many handsome buildings appropriated to their service. The opera-house, erected near the Bockenheimer Tor in 1873-1880, is a magnificent edifice in the style of the Italian Renaissance and ranks among the finest theatres in Europe. There are also a theatre (_Schauspielhaus_) in modern Renaissance style (1899-1902), devoted especially to drama, a splendid concert hall (_Saalbau_), opened in 1861, and numerous minor places of theatrical entertainment. The public picture gallery in the Saalhof possesses works by Hans Holbein, Gruenewald, Van Dyck, Teniers, Van der Neer, Hans von Kulmbach, Lucas Cranach and other masters. The Staedel Art Institute (Staedel'sches Kunstinstitut) in Sachsenhausen, founded by the banker J. F. Staedel in 1816, contains a picture gallery and a cabinet of engravings extremely rich in works of German art. The municipal library, with 300,000 volumes, boasts among its rarer treasures a Gutenberg Bible printed at Mainz between 1450 and 1455, another on parchment dated 1462, the _Institutiones Justiniani_ (Mainz, 1468), the _Theuerdank_, with woodcuts by Hans Schaeufelein, and numerous valuable autographs. It also contains a fine collection of coins. The Bethmann Museum owes its celebrity principally to Dannecker's "Ariadne," but it also possesses the original plaster model of Thorwaldsen's "Entrance of Alexander the Great into Babylon." There may also be mentioned the Industrial Art Exhibition of the Polytechnic Association and two conservatories of