He directed his mind and attention to things about which a healthy philology does not concern itself, such as the Egyptian mysteries and the like. His reading was uncommonly extensive, but he had little scholarship, and owing to this he will be forgotten. He had examined the antiquities of Rome, and had read all the books upon them, but formed no sound conception of the ancient city. Nardini was quite aware that the Forum was the heart of Rome, both topographically and politically, but he unfortunately took an entirely wrong direction; instead of making the buildings succeed one another on the left, he makes them follow on the right, and puts in juxtaposition those which belong to different periods. Hence his confusion; his view of ancient Rome is altogether false. I have gained the right point of view in a peculiar way, and am quite certain of its correctness. I will relate the matter to you as an example of a thread in a labyrinth. Pliny states that, before sun-dials were known at Rome, the parts of the day, sunrise, noon, and sunset were cried out. But the Romans did not calculate according to the moment when the sun really set, but from the moment when the sun was no longer visible in the Forum. By this means it was determined as to whether an act had taken place at the right time or not, for the Romans were very exact in such trifles. Now in the Forum the sun became invisible about three minutes before the real sunset; the crier called out from the Curia, and at the different seasons of the year stated, when he had seen the sun. I have been on the spot innumerable times, and knew the district as well as I knew my own room; I sought the place where the Curia must have stood, and made experiments by watching the sun from that point at the different seasons of the year. By this means I obtained the advantage of certainty in regard to the whole side near the Palatine. Having once found the Curia Hostilia, I had at the same time the Comitium[20] and the Graecostasis. In a poem of Statius there occurs a description of the gigantic equestrian statue of Domitian, and the poet says that it looked towards the temple of Concord: the site of this statue I also succeeded in discovering. It then happened very fortunately that during an excavation an enormous cube was found, on which smaller cubes had been fastened bearing pillars: this was the identical pedestal of the equestrian statue of Domitian. It is clear, that its base consisted of bricks with a coating of marble; the masonry belongs to a period which a practised eye cannot mistake, and we may assert, that the great cubic block was built before the time of Severus, for afterwards the masonry became quite different. In the Monumentum Ancyranum of Augustus, the author, in speaking of a basilica, mentions that a temple of Castor was adjoining it; and this temple I discovered with the assistance of Statius. Its site is a subject of great difficulty, for according to the