smoke, while others were to introduce water. ---------------------------- 1826. The Conte di Velo has been at the expense of excavating a considerable part of these baths. Many fragments were found of sculpture and of architecture, and an immense quantity of pieces of different coloured marbles. The white marble of the architecture was Pentelic. At the depth of six or eight feet, the ancient mosaic pavement was discovered, and even below this are several curious arrangements of walls and conduits which I do not comprehend. At the exhibition in the French academy, there were some beautiful drawings of all the discoveries here made, with a complete restoration of the edifice; in some parts very happy; in others very doubtful. The artist has carefully commemorated some comparatively trifling excavations made by the French academy, and does not even mention the name of the Conte di Velo, by whose means he has been enabled to give interest to his drawings. ---------------------------- 1817. The ancient Romans did not permit their dead to be buried within the city, or if there are a few exceptions, they were granted with a very sparing hand, and the tombs of the Campus Martius are obliterated, except a few great ones, by the modern city. The sepulchre of the Scipios is without the ancient walls, in an opposite direction, but within those of Aurelian. An inscription was dug up here so long ago as 1616, but the antiquaries having fixed upon a building considerably farther on, as the tomb of the Scipios, were unanimous in their opinion that it must be a forgery, and it was not till 1780, that the proprietor of the _Vigna_, working to enlarge his cellar, dug into the ancient excavation, and found the remarkable sarcophagus now in the Vatican, and many other inscribed tablets, which put the matter out of all doubt. It appears originally to have been a quarry of pozzolana, or more probably of tufo, before it was appropriated as a tomb. The ancient entrance is formed by an arch of peperino, adorned with half columns, and this is nearly all the masonry of an early date. Some additions in brick and tufo, seem to have been made afterwards; and still later constructions, of a style of masonry corresponding with that of the circus of Caracalla, were carried through it, or along one side of it. The falling in of the earth had not only covered, but had completely obliterated all traces of the ancient entrance; and a small casino for the vine-dresser, one of those little things so often constructed on the ancient tombs, still farther tended to conceal from the observer any object of interest; a few pieces of old rubble-work are too frequent about the Campagna to excite attention.