matter to kindle great fires at every corner of the pedestal which, by the time this kind of destruction became popular, had already lost much of their original height through the gradual rise of the ground level. This method of blasting by fire would account for the all but universal gnawing away, or rough rounding off of the lower corners of the shaft, in which the bronze dowels were so firmly embedded. After the disintegration of the granite the partially melted bronze could be extracted from both shaft and pedestal, but not before the shaft had been thrown over, and this was evidently helped along by the use of levers. When the shaft was prone, it became possible to remove any bronze which had been attached to its summit. With perhaps only one exception, the fallen shafts were always found broken in three pieces, but there seems to be no record of any bronze found in Rome, near the original sites of the obelisks. What bronze there is was on the one Roman obelisk that had not been thrown down (the Vatican obelisk). The original site of this obelisk, in the centre of the old circus of Caligula and Nero, was close to the old Church of St. Peter, and it was furthermore protected, according to Lanciani, by the chapel at its base, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. When, in 1586, Fontana removed this obelisk to its present position in the centre of the modern Piazza of modern St. Peter’s, he re-erected it upon its original classic Roman crabs, hiding them by the purely decorative Sixtine lions of Prospero Bresciano, as they had been hidden in earlier times by the bronze lions mentioned by Plutarch, and gone since the sack of Rome in 1527. The obelisk in Constantinople, referred to above, is still standing on its four brass “dice.” [I] This story is told in another form. In it Cardinal Farnese employs the same ruse to save the life of the young Duke of Parma. [J] Suetonius, Bk. I. “And he (Cæsar) mounted the Capitol by torchlight with forty elephants bearing lamps on his right and on his left.” [K] The “Memoirs of Madame d’Arblay” relate a touching incident in the life of this exiled Stuart.