boat, any more than the modern racing yacht has developed out of a Dutch galleon or a ‘trabacolo’ of the Adriatic. It had another pedigree; and I have no hesitation in saying, as one well acquainted with both, and not ignorant of boats in general, that the Venetian gondola is the caïque of the Bosphorus, as to the hull, though the former is rowed in the Italian fashion, by men who stand and swing a sweep in a crutch, whereas the Turkish oarsman sits and pulls a pair of sculls of peculiar shape which slide in and out through greased leathern strops. The gondola, too, has the steel ornament on her stem, figuring the beak of a Roman galley, which I suspect was in use in Constantinople before the Turkish conquest, and which must have been abolished then, for the very reason that it was Roman. The ‘felse,’ the hood, is a Venetian invention, I think, for there is no trace of it in Turkey. But the similarity of the two boats when out of water is too close to be a matter of chance, and it may safely be said that the first gondola was a caïque, then doubtless called by another name, brought from Constantinople by some Greek merchant on his vessel. In early times people went about on horses and mules in Venice, and a vast number of the small canals were narrow and muddy streets; but as the superior facilities of water over mud as a means of transportation became evident, the lanes were dug out and the islands were cut up into an immense number of islets, until the footways became so circuitous that the horse disappeared altogether. In the sixteenth century there were about ten thousand gondolas in Venice, and they soon became a regular bugbear to the unhappy Provveditori delle [Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Less._] Pompe, who were forced to occupy themselves with their shape, their hangings, the stuff of which the ‘felse’ was made, the cushions, the carpets, and the number of rowers. The latter were soon limited to two, and it was unlawful to have more, even for a [Illustration: RIO DEL RIMEDIO] wedding. The gondola did not assume its present simplicity and its black colour till the end of the seventeenth century, but it began to resemble what we now see after the edict of 1562.