intervals in the walls of the gallery to receive lamps, and in the central chamber are two niches for similar purposes or for cinerary vases. Outside and about 10 feet in front of the entrance are indications of a raised stone platform, where the ceremony of cremation was probably performed, and where the funeral urn or cinerarium was deposited. The external masonry of the monument is of coarse hard limestone, but the interior filling is of tufa, solidly constructed. The courses of stone are laid with great regularity, breaking bond from top to bottom. They were put together with metal cramps which have long since disappeared, though the mortices in the blocks to receive them are very conspicuous. The masonry of the gallery and the chambers is still in good preservation, having been constructed with large blocks of squared and dressed limestone, and finely jointed. Mortar, if used at all, must have been very thin, and the gallery was apparently faced with thin plaster. The dilapidated condition of the monument externally is attributable to numerous unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the interior in search of treasure, more than once with the aid of artillery. So solid is the construction that, even in its exposed situation, it might have resisted the wear of nineteen centuries and remained fairly perfect to the present day if the destructive Arab had never passed over the land.

During a long period succeeding the Roman occupation of North Africa, when the country was overrun successively by Vandals, Byzantines, and Arabs, the traditions associated with this gigantic tomb and the purposes of its erection seem to have been forgotten. So recently as the time of Shaw it was known by the Arab name of Maltapasi, or Treasure of the Sugarloaf. How it came to receive the absurd appellation by which it is now universally known, 'Le Tombeau de la Chrétienne,' is not difficult to explain. Hear what Dr. Judas, a learned Orientalist, says on the subject. The term Kubr-er-Roumiah of the Arabs is the ancient Phoenician designation which, taken in its original sense, means 'Tombeau Royal.' The natives, instead of translating this foreign word Roumiah, as they ought to have done, have given it the same meaning as a similarly sounding word in their own language, Roumi, viz. 'Strangers of Christian origin,' the feminine being Roumiah. And the French mistranslation originated in a misinterpretation of a feature in the