It was almost thirty years ago—about the middle of April, 1840—that Mr. LAYARD looked upon those vast ruins on the east bank of the Tigris, opposite Mósul, which include the now famous mounds of Konyunjik and of Nebbi Yunus. Having gazed on them with an incipient longing—even then—to explore them thoroughly, he and his companion rode into the desert, and looked with new wonder at the great mound of Kàlàh Sherghat, the site of which is by some geographers identified with the Assur of the book Genesis.[37] After that hasty and tantalising visit, in the spring of 1840, LAYARD did not again see Mósul until the summer of 1842, when he was again travelling Tatar, and hurrying to Constantinople. In the interval, he had often thought of his early purpose, and had talked of it to many travellers. [Sidenote: BOTTA’S FIRST DISCOVERIES.] Now, in 1842, he heard that what he had hitherto been able only to contemplate, as the wished-for task of the future, Monsieur BOTTA, the new French Consul at Mósul, had, for some months, been actually working upon; although, as yet, with very small success. Our countryman encouraged the French Consul in his undertaking, and presently learned that by him the first real monument of old Assyria had been uncovered. This primary discovery was not made at Kouyunjik, but at Khorsabad, near the river Khauser, many miles away from the place at which the first French excavations had been made, early in 1842. The delighted emotions of Monsieur BOTTA, when he found himself, very suddenly, standing in a chamber in which—to all probability—no man had stood since the Fall of Nineveh, and saw that the chamber was lined with sculptured slabs of ‘gypsum-marble’ or alabaster, full of historic scenes from the wars and triumphs of Assyria, a reader can better imagine than a writer can describe. BOTTA himself rather indicates than depicts them, in the deeply interesting letters which he speedily addressed to his friend MOHL at Paris (and which by MOHL were not less promptly published in the _Journal Asiatique_, to be within a month or two pondered and wondered over by almost every archæologist in Europe). The delight, and also the surprise, were enhanced when the discoverer saw that almost every slab had a line of wedge-shaped characters carved above it, giving hope of history in legible inscriptions, as well as history in ruins. For, unhappily, nearly all the sculptures _first_ discovered at Khorsabad were fractured. The durability of the Assyrian style of building had brought about the defacement of the sculptured records. The walls were formed of blocks of gypsum, backed and lined, so to speak, with enormous masses of clay. When the weight of such large earth-banks pressed down upon the sculptured slabs, these were thrust from their place. Many that were still in position, when first seen, fell, or crumbled, as the explorer was looking at them. He had to shore-up and underpin, as he went on; and to do this by unpractised hands.