materials employed in building, and the use of marble for the purposes of sculpture, including a notice of that art and of the most eminent sculptors. The last Book is devoted to an account of gems and precious stones, and concludes with an eulogium on his native country, as alike distinguished for its fertility, its picturesque beauties, and the natural endowments and high destinies of its people. From the writings of Pliny we gather of course a large amount of information as to his opinions and the constitution of his mind. His credulity, it must be admitted, is great in the extreme; though, singularly enough, he severely taxes the Greeks with the same failing[18]. Were we not assured from other sources that he was eminently successful in life, was in the enjoyment of opulence, and honoured with the favour and confidence of princes[19], the remarks which he frequently makes on human life, in the Seventh Book more especially, would have led us to the conclusion that he was a disappointed man, embittered against his fellow-creatures, and dissatisfied with the terms on which the tenure of life is granted to us. He opens that Book with a preface replete with querulous dissatisfaction and repinings at the lot of man—the only ‘tearful’ animal—he says[20]. He repines at the helpless and wretched condition of the infant at the moment it is ushered into life, and the numerous pains and vices to which it is doomed to be subject.—Man’s liability to disease is with him a blemish in the economy of nature:—“life,” he says, “this gift of nature, however long it may be, is but too uncertain and too frail; to those even to whom it is most largely granted, it is dealt out with a sparing and niggardly hand, if we only think of eternity[21].” As we cannot have life on our own terms, he does not think it worthy of our acceptance, and more than once expresses his opinion that the sooner we are rid of it the better. Sudden death he looks upon as a remarkable phænomenon, but, at the same time, as the greatest blessing that can be granted to us[22]: and when he mentions cases of resuscitation, it is only to indulge in the querulous complaint, that, “exposed as he is by his birth to the caprices of fortune, man can be certain of nothing; no, not even his own death[23].” Though anything but[24] an Epicurean, in the modern acceptation of the word, he seems to have held some, at least, of the tenets of Epicurus, in reference to the immortality of the soul. Whether he supposed that the soul, at the moment of death, is resolved into its previous atoms or constituent elements, he does not inform us; but he states it as his belief, that after death the soul has no more existence than it had before birth; that all notions of immortality are a mere delusion[25]; and that the very idea of a future existence is ridiculous, and spoils that greatest[26] blessing of nature—death. He certainly speaks of ghosts or apparitions, seen after death; but these