Judée' has entirely availed himself of my discoveries, which I shewed him, without acknowledging his obligation to me for them, and for the two Plans of ancient and modern Jerusalem annexed to his book, which were furnished by me. Nothing can be more surprising than these caverns, which seem to have been excavated by the generations of old, as a challenge to posterity. Immense halls, with their roofs supported by piers of natural rock, exhibit in their sides openings leading into long dark galleries, terminating in other chambers of large dimensions. On the left hand is a disordered heap of accumulated fragments of rock, a pile of enormous limestone blocks, lying in confusion one on the other; the spaces between which have been filled up by the soil falling down from above, so that on one side it rises like a rugged hill, on another presents a gentle slope; but any one who incautiously attempts to traverse it has reason to repent of his undertaking. At the south end of the first excavation is a kind of fountain, surrounded by stalactites of the strangest shape, which have arranged themselves so as to form a sort of lengthened dome. The water, which falls in drops from above into the little basin, is not good to drink. It is brackish, and from my investigations I have come to the conclusion that it is not supplied by a spring, but filters through from the cisterns excavated in the rock above: in fact, in the rainy season there is an abundant supply, but in summer it is dried up. It becomes brackish in passing through the rock, which contains many saline and ferruginous particles. Going eastward from this fountain, we pass along a cliff on the right hand, while on the left high white walls of rock shew the cavities from which the large stones have been extracted. At last we arrive at the deepest part, where is a chamber about 260 feet long, where we can examine in detail the manner in which the ancients quarried the monolithic columns, the great building stones, and large paving slabs. I think that the monolith in the vaults of _el-Aksa_, in the inner chamber of the Gate of Huldah, was taken from these caves; for here we find a place where a column of stone still hangs down from the roof, like a great stalactite. On comparing with this the measurements of the monolith, they were found to correspond in width and height; and the conjecture is still further confirmed by the colour and character of the stone. The process by which the blocks were extracted can be examined in the side walls. The masses were separated from the rock by vertical grooves nearly four inches wide, the inner boundary of which is a quadrant of a circle. These I believe to have been cut with a circular disk, worked with a handle, which moved it backwards and forwards through a half-revolution. At the present time the Arab masons use an instrument of the same kind in making a groove in a wall. When the groove was made of a sufficient