wise, religious, and happy. And we are pleased to learn of its increasing prosperity. May it continue to increase a thousand fold.

The Stethoscope and Virginia Medical Gazette. Edited by P. Claiborne Gooch, A. M., M. D. Richmond, Va., September, 1853.

The Virginia Historical Register and Literary Companion. July, 1853. Richmond.

The American and Foreign Christian Union. New York. August, 1853.

The Jewish Chronicle. Rev. E. R. McGregor, A. M., Editor. New York,

The Literary World. New York. September, 1853. Its literary articles are able and reliable; and its literary intelligence full and valuable, to all classes interested in the issues of the press.

Norton's Literary Gazette. September, 1853. A most valuable Monthly record of the latest literary intelligence both American and Foreign. Very complete in its various departments; honest and independent as an internuncio to the press and the reading public.

We have received the following pamphlets;

Calmstorm, The Reformer. A Dramatic Comment. New York: W. H. Tinson, Printer. 1853.

Catalogue of the Wesleyan Female College. Macon, Georgia. 1852

1853.

Premium Essay on Agricultural Education. By Edmund Ruffin, of Va. Second edition. J. W. Randolph, Richmond, Va.

The Class-Mate. Edited by H. S. Elliot, a Methodist Class Leader. Germantown, Ohio.

Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. 1853.

The Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America; being the organ of the Board of Missions, Education, Foreign Missions, and Publication. June, 1853. Philadelphia. American Tract Society: Pre

Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the sented at New York, May 11, 1853.

American Edition Household Words: a journal conducted by Charles Dickens. Price 25 cents, by mail $2 a year. New York: Published by McElrath & Barker, 17 Spruce street.

Ecclesiastical Opposition to the Bible: A Serial Sermon: By Thomas H. Stockton. Baltimore.

The Beauty of Holiness and Sabbath Miscellany. Edited by Preachers of the Pittsburg Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Vol. II. August 1853, No. 2.

An Address delivered before the society of the Alumni, of the University of Virginia, at its annual meeting, held in the public hall, June 29, 1853. By James P. Holcombe.

Address delivered before the State Temperance Convention of Georgia, at Atlanta, on the 30th June, 1853. By Rev. W. J. Sasnett, professor of English Literature, Emory College, Oxford, Ga.

Reading: An Address, by Rev. Robert A. Young, A. M. Delivered before the pupils of the Abbe Female Institute, at Lebanon, Tennessee, July 15th, 1853.

ART. X.

BIBLICAL, LITERARY, AND SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANIES.

The Report of the council of the Asiatic Society, May 21st, announces the continued efforts of the French and English discoverers in Assyria during the past year. Vaulted passages, colonnades, and chambers full of valuable relics testify to the skill and energy of the French explorers, and a large collection of cylinders, tiles, ornaments, vessels of beautiful workmanship in agate, marble, and cornelian, form the nucleus of an Assyrian museum in Paris. The labors of our countrymen have also been attended with great success. In one letter, Colonel Rawlinson gives an account of a bronze lion discovered at Nebbi Yunus, bearing the inscription, Esarhaddon, King of Kings, conqueror of Misr and Cush:' (Egypt and Ethiopia.) Colonel Rawlinson has at length received the long-expected cylinder from Kila Shergat; a splendid document consisting of 800 lines of writing, which contains the bulletins of Tiglath-Pilesur I., and is at least 200 years older than any other document yet discovered. Having fairly entered upon a period anterior to the glories of Nineveh and Calah, Colonel Rawlinson says he does not despair of ascending up to the institution of the Monarchy. The writing of this inscription of Tiglath-Pilesur is better, the language more polished, and the grammatical distinctions more

nicely marked, than in the later legends. The capital city, Assur, is of course the Allassur of Genesis, of which Arioch was king, and the Telassur of the Targums which is used for the Mosaic Resen. He considers the site of Nineveh to be determinately fixed at Nebbi Yunus, Calah at Nimrud, and Resen at Kila Shergat.

A slab of Sennacherib's recently found at Nebbi Yunus is of much interest it contains an account of two campaigns, later apparently, than those chronicled in the annals; one against Merodach Baladan, and the other against the confederated kings of the East, among whom is a King of the Persians whose name is unfortunately lost. Colonel Rawlinson expresses himself delighted at the splendid field now opening out in the examination of the débris of the royal library. Here he has found fragments of alphabets, syllabaria, and explanations of ideographic signs, also a table of notation with the phonetic reading of the signs, elaborate dissections of the Pantheon, geographical dissertations explaining the ideographs for countries and cities, designating their products, describing their positions. The principal Asiatic rivers and mountains are also given. There are treatises on weights and measures, divisions of time, points of the compass, and lists of stones, metals, and trees; also what appear to be veritable grammars and dictionaries. The whole collection gives a curious insight into the state of Assyrian science.-Kitto's Journal.

At the Royal Society of Literature, April 13th, the Rev. Dr. Hincks read a paper On certain ancient Arab Queens,' in which he questioned the truth of a discovery lately announced by Colonel Rawlinson, to the effect that the queen of Sheba who visited Solomon was the ruler of a northern district of Arabia, at no great distance from Palestine. Dr. Hincks contended that we had the best authority for believing that, as Queen of the South,' she did really come to Solomon, from the uttermost parts of the earth,' probably from the shores of the Indian ocean. Colonel Rawlinson,

from the fact that he has found on one of the Assyrian inscriptions that a queen of Arabia paid tribute to the King Pul in his eighth year, infers that the country called Sheba in the Bible must be Arabia. Dr. Hincks thinks that there is no doubt that there were many queens of Arabia besides the 'Chabiba,' who was contemporary with Menahem, and that many such are mentioned in ancient authors: moreover, the Assyrian inscriptions themselves notice a second Arab queen in a different part of Arabia.

Dr. Hincks stated, further, that in the historical inscription of Esarhaddon, on a hexagonal cylinder in the British museum, he is mentioned as having conquered Adumi (evidently Edom), a city of Arabia, which of course lay to the south of Palestine. Esarhaddon there states that his father Sennacherib had formerly taken it, and concludes by saying, that he made Zabna, one of his concubines, its queen, and imposed on it a tribute of sixty camels, in addition to the tribute which his father had exacted.

Mr. Vaux read a paper On the Original seat of the Chaldees,' in which he has pointed out all that was known concerning them from the earliest notices in the Bible, and showed that, on the whole, the statements of the Greek geographers, Strabo and Ptolemy, coincided remarkably with the identical notices in the Bible. Mr. Vaux then examined the later history of the same people during the period in which the Jewish Kingdom was in most direct contact with Babylonia, and during the time when a Chaldean ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, invaded and conquered Judea. In opposition to the theory proposed by Professor Huren, and still retained by many writers on the continent, Mr. Vaux expressed his belief that the Chaldean empire of Nebuchadnezzer was not the result of an immigration into Babylonia of a conquering tribe from the northern mountains of Kurdistan, but the gradual growth of many centuries, during which period the Bible and profane authors are equally silent. Mr. Vaux stated that in his opinion, this immigration from the north was a pure conjecture, unbased upon any historical data and at the same time an unsatisfactory attempt to account for an event which is really explained sufficiently by the indications of the earlier history of this people, which may be found in the Bible. At the conclusion of the paper Dr. Hincks made a few remarks in support of the view taken by Mr. Vaux, and stated in confirmation of it that on earlier Assyrian inscriptions which he had deciphered, the Chaldeans are mentioned by name as a people living on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, at the southern extremity of Mesopotamia.

At the Asiatic Society, June the 4th, a letter from Colonel Rawlinson was read, containing some further interpretations of the interesting monument of Tiglath-Pilesur I. He encloses a list of the genealogy of the King, containing twenty-five names, of which the obelisk King, the contemporary of Jehu, is the 15th. He expected to find a notice of the building of Nineveh, but had not succeeded. The cavitol of the empire appeared to be Kila Shergat, to which the names of Assur, Ellasur, Tel-Ani and Resen, might be applied indiscriminately. The Colonel will continue to work at his Scythic memoirs, though he has been drawn off recently by the Assyrian discoveries.

At the Syro-Egyptian Society, April 12th, the Rev. J. Turnbull read a letter from Dr. Grotofend in which he says, that since the deciphering of the inscriptions of Behistun (the printing of which may be expected about the autumn,) he has deciphered some transcriptions of Nebuchadnezzar, one of which contains the offer of the King to let his son be burnt to death, in order to ward off the affliction of Babylon, something similar to what we read of the King of Moab, 2 Kings iii. 27. A second transcription tells us about the hanging gardens laid out for his consort. To these Dr. Grotofend added some other descriptions which elucidate the Babylonian custom of child sacrifices, as illustrated by the cylinders published by the SyroEgyptian Society.

At the same society, June 14th, a letter was read from Mr. W. Cox Dawtrey, Wilts, containing a suggestion, with illustrations, of a certain interpretation of the Scriptures in what concerns the sites of the Holy Places.

Mr. Dawtrey's idea is, that to every event of our Savior's life recorded in the Gospels, a key will be found in the histories of the Old Testament, and the localities of the events thereby determined, whether told us or not. As a specimen, take that of Christ's turning water into wine, which the monks have placed at Kefr Kenna, and Dr. Robinson at Cana-el-Galel. But from the remarkable coincidences to be traced in the history of Ahab and Jezebel, it seems, however, to have occurred at Kanah in Asher; and following the same mode of reasoning, the birth of Christ probably was at Khan Chimham, by Bethlehem, in the way to go into Egypt, and so on the opposite side of the town to where they shew us; the appearance of the angels to the shepherds in the fields of Carmel, in Judah; the wise men from Padan-aram,' &c.

Mr. Thomas Wright read a notice of some medieval travellers in the Holy Land. Mr. Wright pointed out how interesting these early records of travel are when looked upon as forming a long chain of evidence regarding the vexata quaestio of the authenticity of the holy sites; remarking the real difficulty of tracing the localities from the times of the apostles to that of the Empress Helena, to do which we have no documentary evidence whatever. There is reason for looking with suspicion on statements which were just made, three hundred years after the period to which they referred, when the occupation of showing the holy places to pilgrims had become an office of profit, instead of one subject to persecution.

The relations published during the middle ages enable us to trace the continued or varying connections, as it may be, between the localities and the names and legends attached to them, and how both continually increased.

The Rev. J. Turnbull read a paper on Hebron and the cave of Mackpelah, in which, after detailing the history of the city and cave-the name of the first of which he derived from friend,' an epithet of Abraham's as the 'friend of God'―he pointed out how desirable it would be to behold how the patriarch and his sons were laid in the tomb appointed for all living. Jacob's body, it is known, was embalmed after the royal fashion in Egypt; and it is not improbable that Hebrew inscriptions or symbols would be found in the coffin or mummy. The interest of such a discovery, as well as of that of the sarcophagus of Joseph himself, can scarcely be exaggerated. Some enchorial or hieratic characters might have accompanied the Hebrew, and illustrations might be obtained both of the Egyptian and of the Hebrew characters and ideas of the period, so important in relation to modern discoveries in Assyria and Egypt. Palestine,' he remarked, ‘alone