There are, however, other arches wherein the stones are smaller and pointed to a centre as in ours. I have understood from the late Captain Parish, that no masonry could be superior to that of the great wall, and that all the arched and vaulted work in the old towers was exceedingly well turned. This being the case, we may probably be not far amiss in allowing the Chinese to have employed this useful and ornamental part of architecture before it was known to the Greeks and the Romans. Neither the Egyptians nor the Persians appear at any time to have applied it in their buildings. The ruins of Thebes and of Persepolis have no arches, nor have those of Balbec and Palmyra; nor do they seem to have been much used in the magnificent buildings of the Romans antecedent to the time of Augustus. The grand and elegant columns of all these nations were connected by straight architraves of stone, of dimensions not inferior to the columns themselves. In the Hindoo excavations are arches cut out of the solid mountain; but when loose stones were employed, and a building was intended to be superstructed on columns, the stones above the capitals were overlaid like inverted steps, till they met in a point in the middle above the two columns, appearing at a little distance exactly like the gothic arch, of which this might have given the first idea. If then the antiquity be admitted which the Chinese ascribe to the building of the great wall, and no reason but a negative one, the silence of Marco Polo, has been offered against it (an objection easily refuted), they have a claim to the invention of the arch founded on no unsolid grounds. The cemeteries, or repositories of the dead, exhibit a much greater variety of monumental architecture than the dwellings of the living can boast of. Some indeed deposit the remains of their ancestors in houses that differ in nothing from those they inhabited while living, except in their diminutive size; others prefer a square vault, ornamented in such a manner as fancy may suggest; some make choice of a hexagon to cover the deceased, and others of an octagon. The round, the triangular, the square, and multangular column, is indifferently raised over the grave of a Chinese; but the most common form of a monument to the remains of persons of rank consists in three terraces, one above another, inclosed by circular walls. The door or entrance of the vault is in the centre of the uppermost terrace, covered with an appropriate inscription; and figures of slaves and horses and cattle, with other creatures that, when living, were subservient to them and added to their pleasures, are employed after their death to decorate the terraces of their tombs. "Quæ gratia currûm Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos." Virgil, Æneid vi.