The Prussian consul at Smyrna, M. Spiegenthal, has examined this monument with more care, and has explored the interior. He gives the average diameter of the mound as 281 yards, which would require a circumference of about half a mile, as roughly estimated by Mr. Hamilton. “Carrying a tunnel into the interior of the mound, he discovered a sepulchral chamber composed of large blocks of white marble, highly polished, situated almost in the centre of the tumulus. The chamber measured about 11 feet by 8, and was 7 feet in height. It was empty, and contained no inscription or sarcophagus. This chamber, no doubt, had been entered and ransacked in remote times, and its treasures, whatever they may have been, carried off. There can be little doubt that this marble chamber was the actual resting-place of the Lydian king, who died according to our chronologies, B.C. 568.” This structure, when seen by Herodotus, was a recent work--say about 130 years had passed over it: it is now a mound, crumbling into a formless mass:--meantime the description of it--even this page of Greek--in my view--is, as to its historic and its literary integrity, as fresh and as perfect as it was two thousand years ago--yes, and it is as imperishable as anything mundane can be. This Greek text will cease to exist--never--unless a deluge of water, of fire, or of universal barbarism shall come to wrap this planet in its pall. As nothing is attempted in this volume beyond the illustration of the method or process of historical evidence, we take only a glance at those visible confirmations of our author’s testimony, which are now directing the curiosity of the learned men of Europe, toward the levels of Mesopotamia--the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. The mounds, the basement works, the gigantic sculptures, the inscriptions, combine to give evidence concerning Nineveh, and Babylon, and Persepolis, and in doing so shed a light upon remote antiquity, which, while it extends the limits of what is called “the historic period,” avails also at once to correct and to corroborate the extant written materials of history. Heretofore the existence of very many contradictions in these literary materials, and the suspicious aspect of portions of it, had thrown a vague uncertainty over the whole. But the course of inquiry, at this time, has a discriminative tendency, and it will, in its results, undoubtedly enable those who shall be competent to the task, to set off the true and certain, from the false and the doubtful, throughout the entire range of ancient history. Far more important than the determination of any particular problems in the Assyrian, or Babylonish, or Persian history, such as the disputed date of wars, or the succession of monarchs, is the exclusion of those loose modes of thinking and of writing, the aim and _intention_ of which has been to bring all history under suspicion, and thus to divert attention from