tific bodies, venerable in their
antiquity, began, alas! to acquire a slight tinge and veneer of
ridicule, which raised a smile and recalled the synods of bonzes or
ecclesiastical conferences, such as are represented in very ancient
pictures. It is, therefore, not surprising that this first dynasty of
imperial physicists and geometricians, genial copies of the Antonines,
were promptly succeeded by a dynasty of artists who had deserted art to
wield the sceptre, as they lately had wielded the bow, the roughing
chisel, and the brush. The most famous of all, a man possessed of an
overflowing imagination which was yet well under control, and ministered
to by an unparalleled energy, was an architect who among other gigantic
projects formed the idea of rasing to the ground his capital,
Constantinople, in order to rebuild it elsewhere, on the site of ancient
Babylon, which for three thousand years had been a desert--a truly
luminous idea. In this incomparable plain of Chaldea watered by a second
Nile there was another still more beautiful and fertile Egypt awaiting
resurrection and metamorphosis, an infinite expanse extending as far as
the eye could see, to be covered with striking public buildings
constructed with magical speed, with a teeming and throbbing population,
with golden harvests beneath a sky of changeless blue, with an iron
net-work of railways radiating from the town of Nebuchadnesor to the
furthest ends of Europe, Africa and Asia, and crossing the Himalayas,
the Caucasus, and the Sahara. The stored energy, electrically conveyed,
of a hundred Abyssinian waterfalls, and of, I do not know, how many
cyclones, hardly sufficed to transport from the mountains of Armenia the
necessary stone, wood and iron for these numerous constructions. One day
an excursion train, composed of a thousand and one carriages, having
passed too close to the electric cable at the moment when the current
was at its maximum, was destroyed and reduced to ashes in the twinkling
of an eye. None the less Babylon, the proud city of muddy clay, with its
paltry splendours of unbaked and painted brick, found itself rebuilt in
marble and granite, to the utmost confusion of the Nabopolassars, the
Belshazzars, the Cyruses, and the Alexanders. It is needless to add that
the archaeologists made on this occasion the most priceless discoveries,
in the several successive strata, of Babylonian and Assyrian
antiquities. The mania for Assyriology went so far that