And, first, we come across the baptism of our Lord himself. We are not now thinking of the subterranean baptistery in the cemetery of Ponziano, with the highly-decorated cross standing up out of the middle of it, and Christ’s baptism painted at the side. For this is one of the latest artistic productions in the Catacombs—a work of the eighth or ninth century possibly. We are thinking, on the contrary, of one of the earliest paintings in a most ancient part of the excavations, in the crypt of Lucina, near the cemetery of Callixtus, with which, in fact, it is now united. We shall have occasion to return to this same chamber presently for the sake of other paintings on its walls having reference to the Holy Eucharist; just here we only call attention to the baptism of our Lord, which is represented in the space over the doorway. We do not know of any other instance of this subject having been painted in the Catacombs besides the two that we have mentioned, but it is quite possible that others may be hereafter discovered; but of baptism as a Christian rite, veiled, however, under its types and symbols, we have innumerable examples. Few figures recur more frequently among the paintings in the Catacombs, and none are more ancient, than that of a man standing in an open box or chest, often with a dove, bearing an olive-branch in its mouth, flying towards him. When this was first seen after the rediscovery of the Catacombs in the sixteenth century, men set it down to be the picture of some ancient bishop preaching in a pulpit, and the Holy Ghost, under the form of a dove, inspiring him as to what he should say, according to the legend told of St. Gregory the Great and some others. Nobody now doubts that it was intended for Noe in the ark; not, however, the historical Noe and the historical ark—for nothing could be more ludicrously false to the original—but those whom that history foreshadowed: Christians saved by the waters of baptism and securely housed in the ark of the church. Some persons, who seem to take a perverse delight in assigning a pagan rather than a Christian origin to everything in the early church, account for the difference between the Biblical and the artistic representation of the ark by saying that the Christian artist did but copy a pagan coin or medal which he found ready to his hands. It is quite true that certain coins which were struck at Apamea in Phrygia during the reigns of Septimius Severus, Macrinus, and Philip the elder—_i.e._, at different periods in the first half of the third century—exhibit on one side of them a chest, with a man and a woman standing within it, and the letters ΝΩ, or ΝΩΕ, written on the outside; and that these figures were intended to be a souvenir of the Deluge, which held a prominent place in the legends of Phrygia. It is said that the town of Apamea claimed to derive its secondary name of κιβωτός, or ark, from the fact that it was here that the ark rested; and it is quite