The mode of proceeding adopted by M. Arnaud, who spoke the Arabic fluently, was to travel as a Mussulman, in company with a caravan going to the place. His plan was happily crowned with success. In the middle of July he reached the city, where he saw the imposing remains of the ancient dam, said to have been built across the valley of Mareb by Balkis herself, and which, by collecting an immense body of water near the metropolis, whence the surrounding country was irrigated, had given rise to the fertility and beauty for which the region was celebrated in ancient times. On these remains M. Arnaud discovered a number of inscriptions, as also among the ruins of the former city; among the most remarkable of these is one called Harem Balkis, which is thought to be the remains of the palace of the ancient Sabean kings. The inscriptions of which Mr. Arnaud brought away copies with him amount to fifty-six in number. The tour of M. Wrede was also not unproductive in this respect. He copied, among others, a long inscription in Wadi Doan; which, according to the interpretations that have since been made of it, contains a list of kings more copious than those which have been left us by Albulfeda and other historians of the middle ages. When M. Arnaud returned to Jiddah from his hazardous and toilsome expedition, M. Fresnel, who had originally moved him to the undertaking, set about studying the new inscriptions, aided by the previous labors of the German scholars and his own knowledge of Arabic and the modern Himyaritic. Possessing a far more abundant supply of materials than had been collected before, he was able to assign to a few doubtful characters their proper values. He transmitted to Paris a fair copy of the original inscriptions, and also a transcription of them in the Arabic character, showing how they should be read. A fount of Himyaritic types having been constructed for the express purpose at the Imprimerie Royale, they were all published in the course of last year in the Journal Asiatique, together with several letters on the subject from M. Fresnel. The form of the characters in these inscriptions is essentially the same as in those discovered before; but, whereas the former ones all read from right to left like the Arabic of the present day, some of the new ones are found to read alternately from right to left and from left to right, like some of the inscriptions of ancient Greece. M. Fresnel's attention has been mainly directed to the collection and identification of the proper names of persons, deities, and places, in which the inscriptions abound, and in which he recognises many names mentioned in Scripture, and in Greek, Roman, and Arabian authors. Thus he identifies the deity 'Athtor with the Ashtoreth or Venus of the Hebrews. He finds in an inscription at Hisn Ghorab the word Kaná, showing the correctness of the conclusion already arrived at that this is the _Cane emporium_ of Ptolemy.