Quaresmius (writing in 1616 A. D.) preserves a letter from Father Boniface of Raguza, who was present in 1555 when the building over the Holy Sepulchre was repaired. We must accept his statement that, when the covering (of marble) was taken off, “the sepulchre of our Lord appeared in its original state hewn in the rock.” But he does not speak of there being any rock cave over it. On the contrary, there were walls decorated by two ancient frescoes of angels, together with a parchment bearing the name “Helena Magna” in Latin capitals, which was probably much later than her time. When the great basilica was first built, the rock was levelled sufficiently to form a flat floor for the great apse; but a little to the south-east the cliff supposed to be Calvary was allowed to stand up 15 feet above this floor, with the cavern of Golgotha beneath its flat summit. The rock face in which the door of the Jewish tomb, west of the Sepulchre, was cut stood up 6 feet above the floor, and it appears that the rock surface sloped gently eastwards, so that the existence of a cave at least 7 feet high, with rock above it, seems to have been impossible at the spot where the Holy Sepulchre itself was found. That grave must have been simply a rock-sunk tomb, covered probably by a large and heavy stone, and when the floor was levelled it stood up as a trough, with rock walls, about 2 feet above the pavement of the apse. Such graves are not uncommon in Palestine, being sometimes single, sometimes three or more in a row, each covered by a hewn stone like the lid of a sarcophagus. I have described one group which I found in 1872 at Sepphoris, north of Nazareth; and in another case at Mithilia--a ruin not far off--a rock sarcophagus stands up alone on a rock which has been scarped on each side below it. At Umm el Buruk, in Gilead, there are other examples which I described in 1881, and this site is the ruin of a Roman town, with a Greek inscription stating that “Antonius Rufus” made something (apparently a tomb) “for himself at his own cost.”[417] There can be little doubt that graves of this kind belong to the Roman period, and they are neither Hebrew nor even Greco-Jewish. The “new tomb” in the garden was of the last-named class, with a _loculus_ so placed in the cave that the two angels could be seen from the door sitting at the head and foot of the grave itself. Macarius cannot apparently have found such a tomb, but he discovered a rock-sunk grave which, as it was single and also near a Hebrew tomb, he rashly assumed to be the sepulchre which he hoped to find. He was not an archæologist, nor was he well acquainted with the topography of the ancient city which Hadrian had transformed into a modern town. We need not doubt that he was as honestly convinced about the matter as General Gordon was convinced about the “Garden Tomb.” But they both appear to have been misled by enthusiasm without knowledge, and they both created