I have brought home both these instruments after performing the whole journey, and they are now standing in my library, in the most perfect order; which is rather to be wondered at from the accounts in which most travellers seem to agree, that metal speculums, within the tropics, spot and rust so much as to be useless after a few observations made at or near the zenith. The fear of this, and the fragility of glass of achromatic telescopes, were the occasion of a considerable expence to me; but from experience I found, that, if a little care be taken, one reflector would be sufficient for a very long voyage. From Paris I received a time-piece and a stop-watch made by M. Lepeaute, dearer than Ellicot’s, and resembling his in nothing else but the price. The clock was a very neat, portable instrument, made upon very ingenious, simple principles, but some of the parts were so grossly neglected in the execution, and so unequally finished, that it was not difficult for the meanest novice in the trade to point out the cause of its irregularity. It remains with me in statu quo. It has been of very little use to me, and never will be of much more to any person else. The price is, I am sure, ten times more than it ought to be in any light I can consider it. All these letters still left me in absolute despair about obtaining a quadrant, and consequently gave me very little satisfaction, but in some measure confirmed me in my resolution already taken, to go from Sidon to Egypt; as I had then seen the greatest part of the good architecture in the world, in all its degrees of perfection down to its decline, I wished now only to see it in its origin, and for this it was necessary to go to Egypt. Norden, Pococke, and many others, had given very ingenious accounts of Egyptian architecture in general, of the disposition and size of their temples, magnificence of their materials, their hieroglyphics, and the various kinds of them, of their gilding, of their painting, and their present state of preservation. I thought something more might be learnt as to the first proportions of their columns, and the construction of their plans. Dendera, the ancient Tentyra, seemed by their accounts to offer a fair field for this.