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come so many points of obstruction, and at them the cylinder is apt to block. A nucleus is then laid for the stoppage of the solid material, and that once laid is sure to increase rapidly and become a firm obstruction. It has been a subject of dispute of late years of what the surface of the interior of the house-drain should be composed. It is customary to use the glazed pipe composed of earthenware. It would seem at first sight that nothing could be more adaptable to what is wanted than the smooth earthenware tube. In practice it is nevertheless found that the glazed surface is not altogether desirable. One of the chief obstructing agents in the house-drain is the fat which, in the fluid state-dissolved in the hot water in which dishes are washed-cools on entering the drain, and, becoming solid as it passes along, adheres to the side of the tube, and by accretion closes it very much or altogether. On the glazed surface the fat accretes more closely than on any other; it becomes as it were a part of the surface itself, and, like two pieces of glass which tightly pressed together are like one, it and the surface on which it lies are like one. There is nothing to separate them, and one layer of fat laid down, it becomes a foundation for any number that follow, until the diameter of the tube is, in the most scientific way, reduced to the smallest dimensions. A somewhat rougher tube is, therefore, more desirable, and a tube of a structure like cement, with a joint which locks in a very ingenious manner, is now becoming a favorite tube for the house-drain. The safest and, up to this time, the best tube is one of iron, in good lengths, or in one entire length, the interior lined, and the joints completely sealed. To this the expense is the one serious objection.

The main tube laid and tested, and a free communication established between it and the sewer, the other tubes from all parts of the house, from the soil-pipes, sinks, and subsidiary drains, should be brought into the main, the utmost care being taken that the connections between them and the main are secure. In carrying down the smaller pipes, it should be a matter of caution to avoid all sharp angles; where an angle has to be turned, it should be turned with a good round corner, and with as full a fall direct from the angle as can be secured; then there is less chance of lodgment of solid substance at the angle.

Of the pipes that are laid to enter the principal house-drain, the soil-pipe is the most important. It is requisite, it is even urgent, that this pipe should, whenever it is in any way possible, be carried down on the outside of the house. I know this is not always possible in houses which have been built long ago, and I regret to observe that it is not always carried out in houses that have been built in the present day, but this does not alter the advisability. If the soil-pipe must be inside the house, it should be fixed with special care that the joints be closed-should there be joints-and the joints should be as few as can be. I do not agree with the view that

the pipe should be imbedded in the wall, and so be made inaccessible. On the contrary, it ought, in my opinion, to be perfectly accessible at every point of its course, and only kept out of sight by a movable wooden or metal panel.

All the tributary drains having been brought into communication with the chief drain of the house, and all closely sealed into it, the chief drain has to be trapped outside the dwelling, a little way before it reaches the common sewer. I shall deal with the question of the best general trap farther on, but at this moment I only refer to the fact that the main drain has to be trapped securely. By this means it is to a large extent cut off from the sewer; but not entirely, for no trap has been invented which absolutely shuts off the sewer air. As a consequence it is necessary that the main drain should be provided with what may be designated a safety-valve arrangement; in other words, it has to be ventilated in such a way that if any gas shall escape from retained decomposing matter, or shall return from the sewer, it shall not enter the house to pollute it, but shall find its exit into the open air. How this may be effected will appear in my next communication.

[NOTES TO CORRESPONDENTS-COSTLESS VENTILATION.-I have to thank Dr. Banning, of Gateshead-upon-Tyne, for an explanation of an improvement in carrying out Dr. Peter Hinkes Bird's "costless ventilation," which in building a new house can be adapted to all windows without additional expense. The plan is simply to make the lower part of the bottom sash twice the depth that it is usually made, with a corresponding deeper socket in the sill. The advantages are that the amount of ventilating space can be adjusted with the utmost exactness, that there is no draught at the bottom of the window, that there is no bar of wood to remove or replace, and that the sash is perfectly sightly and unobtrusive.

Further "Notes to Correspondents" will be given in future numbers.-B. W. R.]-B. W. RICHARDSON, M. D., in Good Words.

A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE IN ASIA MINOR.

Ir was a warm sunny morning towards the end of September when I left the little town of Nimphi under the protection of an escort of soldiers. Nimphi lies about twenty miles inland from Smyrna, at the foot of a lofty crag, the sides of which are hollowed into tombs. We rode up the steep, narrow street of the little town, and, leaving behind us the stately shell of a ruined Roman palace, turned eastward towards the plain of the Hermus, where the kingdom of Lydia once grew up and became great. On our left was the huge mass of Mount Sipylus, the rounded form of its eastern

shoulder descending abruptly into the plain below, while on our right rose a rugged line of hills, the furthermost spur of Tmolus, broken into ravines and dark with forests. Our path led along their slope, past bushes each of which had to be examined in advance to make sure that no brigand was hidden behind it, until, after a ride of some two or three hours, we forded the Kara-su, or Black Water, clambered up the bank on the other side, and, forcing our way through a thick undergrowth of shrubs, found ourselves in the gorge of the Karabel, the object of the morning's ride. The gorge is a narrow one, opening out on the north opposite the eastern shoulder of Sipylus, and leading on the south, by a rude and little frequented track, into the plain of the Kayster and the once fertile district of Ephesus. On either side rises an almost precipitous cliff, covered with trees and bushes, and tenanted only by brigands, while a similar cliff shuts in the pass in front, and gives good reason to the Turkish name of the place, the Kara-bel, or Black Forest.

But this Black Forest conceals some of the most curious and interesting monuments in the world, monuments that takes us back to a long-forgotten day, when, as yet the Greeks were destitute of culture and art, when Gyges had not founded his dynasty hard by at Sardes, or Croses ruled over the Lydian empire. They have risen up from the dead, as it were, during the last two years to tell us of a power which had its seat far away on the banks of the Euphrates, but which carried its armies to the very shores of the Egean Sea, and helped the Phenicians in communicating to the nations of the West the civilization of Assyria and Babylon.

In the year 1839 the Rev. J. C. Renouard discovered, high up above the path on the eastern side of the valley, a carving in the rock. The stone has been hollowed out into a niche, within which stands the figure of a man, six feet high, with the Phrygian cap on the head, boots with turned-up ends on the feet, a quiver slung at the back, and a spear in the left hand. The whole carving is of a very marked and peculiar character, and the art to which it testifies must have had a long and independent development.

But, as we now know, it does not stand alone. Step by step, region by region, we can trace it along the two high roads that traversed Asia Minor and met in the Lydian capital, the one running from the Halys through Phrygia, the other passing the Cilician Gates and the rugged mountains of Lykaonia. At a place called GhiaurKalessi, "the fortress of the infidel," near the villages of Hoïadj and Kara-omerlu, about nine hours to the southwest of Angora, the ancient Ancyra, and upon the old line of road which led fron Armenia to Lydia, M. Perrot has discovered an ancient fortress, and beside it a rock carved into the likeness of two men, nine feet in height, who reproduce even to the smallest details the art and peculiarities of the sculpture of Karabel. Here, too, each figure carries

his spear and quiver, wears the same short tunic and Phrygian cap, is shod with the same curious kind of "tip-tilted" boot, and has the same thick limbs and stunted growth. The walls of the fortress also that stand hard by have a style of architecture quite their own. The stones of which they are composed are polygonal, but the lateral joints and external faces are dressed. The architecture, in fact, is that termed the third polygonal. The same style of building char-acterizes the walls of another prehistoric fortress at Boghaz Keui, supposed to represent the ancient Pteria, about fifty miles to the east of the lower Halys. At Boghaz Keui, too, there are sculptures which at the first glance will show us belong to the same peculiar style of art, and were, perhaps the work of the same people, as the sculptures of Karabel and Ghiaur-Kalessi. But they are on a far larger scale, and are intended to represent divinities rather than men. The flat surface of an amphitheater of rock has been covered with these remarkable figures. There they stand, figure after figure, as it were in a triumphal procession, the goddesses crowned with mural crowns, the feet of some among them resting on leopards and lions, like certain deities on the carved gems of ancient Babylonia, while the gods appear in lofty tiaras or Phrygian caps, and all bear in their hands the symbols of their attributes and divinity. In one spot we see the double-headed eagle which in later days was chosen by the Seljukian sultans as their crest, and has since been made familiar to ourselves by the two empires of Central Europe. In another place is the winged solar disk, imported originally from Assyria, but given a new and characteristic form of its own.

But the rocks of Boghaz Keui bear upon them something more precious than even these sculptured deities and their strange symbols. At one place an inscription of ten or eleven lines has been cut in relief upon the stone, while close to each divinity are other inscriptions cut in a similar way and containing the names of the gods to whom they are attached. The inscriptions are composed of a number of curious hieroglyphics, some resembling the heiroglyphics of Egypt, others altogether peculiar, such as tip-tilted shoes, tiaraed human heads, or the heads of animals in profile, while others again have lost all likeness to the objects of which they were originally the pictures.

These hieroglyphics, though still undeciphered, have already let us into the secrets of the sculptures they accompany. The figure at Karabel has exactly the same hieroglyphics, cut in relief, attached to it. Texier first detected them, but his drawing was incorrect, and the chief object of my visit to the spot last year was to obtain a facsimile. Now that the facsimile has been obtained, we have positive proof that the race which produced the sculptures of Karabel, of Ghiaur-Kalessi, and of Boghaz Keui, used everywhere the same system of writing.

We now know what this race was. It was the race called Hittites

in the Old Testament, Kheta and Khatti on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, whom Mr. Gladstone would identify with the Keteians of the Odyssey. Their wars with Egypt are pictured on the walls of the great temples of Thebes and Abu-Simbel, and we may read at Karnak the text of a treaty made by the Egyptian monarch Ramses II., the Sesostris of Herodotus, with the king of the Hittites, after long years of inglorious struggle. The Hittites entered into alliance with Egypt upon equal terms, and the two monarchs agreed not to punish the political offenders who may have fled from the one country to the other during the period of mutual conflict. The Hittite text of the treaty, we are told, was engraved upon a tablet of silver; and although this was done more than 3,000 years ago, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the tablet may yet be found.

For the northern capital of the Hittite prince has been discovered, and is now being excavated at the expense of the British Museum. It was called by the Hittites Carchemish, the city which commanded the fords of the Euphrates, on the high road from Assyria to the west, and the spot where Pharaoh Necho was foiled by Nebuchadnezzar in his attempt to win for Egypt the sovereignty of Western Asia. Its ruins are now called Jerabis, or Jerablus, an Arabic perversion of the Greek Hierapolis," the sacred city" of the Asiatic goddess. Here, about sixteen miles to the south of the modern Birejik, was the chief seat of Hittite power and wealth, down to the time when its last king, Pisiris, was overcome by the armies of Sargon, and the Hittite capital became the seat of an Assyrian governor. The first fruits of the excavations at Carchemish have reached this country in the shape of two fragments of stone, thickly covered with inscriptions in relief, and one of them still showing portions of the figure of a king. The dress of the figure, as well as the style of art to which it belongs, are identical with those of the figures of Karabel and Boghaz Keui, and what is more, the hieroglyphics by which it is accompanied are identical with those I copied on the Lydian monument. The Hittite origin of the monuments of Asia Minor to which I have been drawing attention is thus put beyond question.

Mr. George Smith, to whom along with Mr. Skene is due the credit of identifying the site of Carchemish, found a broken statue on the spot, with another inscription on the back in what we may now term Hittite characters. A leading peculiarity of these characters is that, wherever they have hitherto been met with, they are always in relief, never incised. This points to the fact that plates of metal must have been the first writing materials used by the Hittites, a fact which is further confirmed by other evidence.

The inscriptions disinterred at Carchemish are not the only ones that have come from the territory of the Hittites. Another exists at Aleppo, and five others in a hieratic form of the characters were