ences into the womb of a self-subsisting nature, as the husbandman drops his seed into mother earth; or, with deeper thought, observing that the spirit of man is the man, and, thinking of the life-spirit of an animal as the essense of the animal, we may conceive of life-essences or spiritual types or entities, now and then sown in the seed-time, springing up and harvested, and followed by the declining season, or a winter of decay, all in true cyclical succession; and so rise to a theory of nature as a separate, growing, sleeping, and blundering individuality, in analogy with the individuality of man.

We may go still higher, and conceive of many natures having thus been made, each to go through with its cycles of activity and sleep, growth, successive germinations, and death; and regard existing nature as one in a series, that began somewhere in the infinite past, and the germinations in its progress as due to some law of reproduction, or to action on the part of the Creator imparting the life-essences necessary to new births. Thus the mind ascends from the facts of this dull world, to a system which shall embrace an infinity of worlds, and an infinity of successive natures. And should not finite mind exult in seeing, within its grasp, universe upon universe of worlds, reaching from eternity to eternity?

This is the path by which ancient philosophy ascended to its sublime height. The philosopher started from the earth, from scientific facts and analogies, indeed, whether so recognized or not; and from these took his adventurous flight. And is it not from somewhere in those heights, that the author of the "World-Problem" looks down, and talks of the "gabble," "prattle," and "Batrachian clamor" of science? At so lofty an elevation, he sees only the surface of things, and rejoices in the "honest, open face."

Now, to his misfortune, the elevation is no real one. The ascent is very much such as a man may make by pulling at his ears if persevered in, the effort might perhaps make the ears long.

We may see the harmonies of earth; we may take in

all these harmonies as one chorus; and then, in ecstasy of joy, we should look up and give praise to the one infinite God. This is the legitimate end of all the finite around us. Its very oneness was intended to exhibit God's oneness; its beauty, perfect order, and unbending law, his wisdom and inflexibility of purpose; its irresistible energies, his power; and its passing and past events, his appointed plan of progress through the ages. But when we begin to scale the heavens on reason's wings alone, it ends, whether we think it or not, in an assault on the eternal throne. This is the daring Babel of intellect, of which the brick Babel was but a type.

We see well the feebleness of mind for such attempted flights, in its devising or adopting a "development theory," and suggesting at least the hypothesis, that a monkey might have been straightened up into the body of a man.1 We see its spirit in its grand nature-system, while the study of nature is held in distrust. Arrogant, pretentious, bigotted science! Arrogant, because it dares to clip the pinions of such philosophy. Pretentious, because it claims to study God's works, and learn truth therefrom. Bigoted, because its faith in nature, as a revelation from God, allows it not to swerve from the true interpretation of His laws!

Philosophy of the "pure reason" kind, in its ambitious reachings, once claimed that man, and all nature, were but an eternal round. But the records placed in the earth have put a check to that conception, confirming the sacred word, and curbing hypothesis. It thought to make creation a growth from the simple planting of monads, and a beautiful idea it was deemed. But here God's records in the earth put another check, declaring that it was not so. It thought to make a few successive plantings to give out the grand result. But the same records, like a voice from omnipotence coming up from the depths of the past, say beware! there has been no making of species from species. Man is thus almost forced, by his study of the earth, to acknowledge the Creator's hand. He may walk firmly and joyfully as far as 1 Six Days of Creation.

2 World-Problem.

he has that hand to guide him, and then should bow humbly before him who alone is from everlasting to everlasting. We have yet to inquire, What is the true idea of nature's individuality.

[To be concluded.]

ARTICLE VII.

BRANDIS ON THE ASSYRIAN INSCRIPTIONS AND THE MODE OF INTERPRETING THEM.

By Professor George E. Day, Lane Theological Seminary.

[The following essay is taken, with some abridgment, from a recent treatise "on the historical gain from the Deciphering of the Assyrian Inscriptions," by Dr. Brandis of the University of Bonn, of whose labors in this department, honorable mention is made in the Annual Report of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1856. It has been translated for the Bibliotheca Sacra, not only as furnishing an interesting view of the serious difficulties to be encountered in ascertaining the meaning of these ancient records, and the means employed to overcome them, but also as exhibiting the ground of the distrust with which many of the translations of Rawlinson and Hincks have been received in Germany.]

NoT far from the eastern bank of the Tigris, opposite to Mosul, rise two mounds, between which winds a small stream called the Khosser. Upon the northern mound, which is about fifty feet in height, and much larger and higher than the one on the south, stands the village of Koyunjik; upon the southern one, called Nebbi Yunus, stands a mosque [said to be] erected over the tomb of the prophet Jonah, and surrounded by dwellings. Both of these mounds are remains of artificially constructed terraces, on which

palaces and temples of the Assyrian capital once stood. This extended, according to the testimony of antiquity, from the Great Zab, northward along the Tigris, in the form of a parallelogram, the circumference of which, as given by Ctesias, was 480 stadia or 60 [geographical] miles. These mounds opposite to Mosul, therefore, can have occupied but a part of the area inclosed by the city wall; and the two points at which the most important remains have been discovered, viz. those where the villages of Khorsabad and Nimrud stand, were inclosed within the ancient city. The former is five hours north-east from Mosul; the latter, six hours below, on the Tigris. Here at Nimrud, where the Zab empties into the Tigris, rises a pyramidal hill, which overlooks a terrace-formed summit, on which lies the village of Nimrud. It was this which arrested the attention of Xenophon, when he passed, with the Ten Thousand, by the ruins of the city, without dreaming what activity had existed here scarcely two hundred years before.

At this period Layard, it is well known, commenced in the year 1845 his successful excavations, and brought out of the rubbish the ruins of four great palaces and several other edifices. Here, too, the most ancient and the most recent of the Assyrian buildings had stood side by side. When Nineveh was destroyed, the oldest of these palaces, as it seems, which occupied the north-west corner of the terrace, was already in ruins, and the materials of which it was constructed had been freely drawn from, in the construction of the south-west palace. Hence, while all the others give evidence of destruction by fire, the former alone shows no trace of any such catastrophe. Botta, who as early as the year 1843 had discovered the first Assyrian palace at Khorsabad, was stimulated by the success of Layard to institute explorations in the mound of Koyunjik, but with no considerable results. It was reserved for Layard to exhume both these, and, at Nebbi Yunus several additional Assyrian buildings. In December, 1846, the first Assyrian sculptures were brought, in the Cormorant, to Europe. Since then, the Louvre and the British Museum, have received numerous additional treas

ures from the excavations carried on in Mesopotamia by English and French funds; but, in consequence of the Turkish war, the activity of the Assyrian Fund Society has been recently suspended.1

Besides Nineveh, there are numerous other places within and without the ancient Assyrian empire, in which written and sculptured monuments of the kings have been found. The most remarkable of these is the figure, in relief, of a king almost entirely covered with an inscription, which was discovered in Larnaka, the ancient Citium, in the island of Cyprus, and is now preserved in the Berlin Museum. Such commemorative tablets of Assyrian conquests have frequently been found, both in ancient and in modern times. One was seen by the attendants of Alexander, near the Cilician city Anchiale, which, as the Assyrians told them, was placed there by Sardanapalus. This description agrees exactly with the ancient figures with which we are now acquainted.

A similar tablet still exists, hewn in the rocks, at Nahr-elKelb, near Beirût, together with a row of Babylonian and Egyptian sculptures, which were intended to immortalize the march of Rameses and the expeditions of Assyrian and Babylonian forces upon the great highway through Syria and along the coast of the Mediterranean, which connected Mesopotamia with Egypt.3 Further west than Nahrel-Kelb, no trace of Assyrian sculpture has yet been found.

1 In 1855, the works of the Assyrian excavation Society were placed under the direction of the British Museum. To the members of that Society, Mr. Loftus, who was employed by them, and subsequently by Col. Rawlinson, and whose "Researches in Chaldea and Susiana" have been recently published, affirms that the British nation is indebted for the discovery and exhumation of a series of bas-reliefs which, for their artistic conception, bold relief, and delicacy of finish, are to be regarded as the chefs-d'œuvre of Assyrian art. They were obtained from the northern half of the mound of Koyunjik, which forms the centre of the ruins of Nineveh, and proves to be the great treasure-house of Assyrian Antiquities. The excavations, at this point, were made in 1854; and the collection of marbles and antiquities, thus gained, was received by the British Museum in the early part of 1856.-Tr.

Arrian. Exped. Alex. II., 5.

3 These tables were examined by Dr. Robinson in his recent tour, and are described in his "Later Bib. Researches." pp. 419-23.—Tr.