, on her
estate:... which afterward, being decayed and near to ruin through the
long course of years, was restored by Pope Leo the Third.' Of this most
noble church, which was one of the chief monuments of the Christian
religion, as well as an ornament of the city of Rome, no vestige at this
day remains."

It is remarkable that a church restored so late as the time of Leo III.
[A.D. 795-816] should have been so lost without being utterly destroyed,
and so buried under the slowly-accumulating soil of the Campagna, that the
very tradition of the existence of its remains should have disappeared,
and its discovery have been the result of scientific archaeeological
investigation.

The disappearance and the forgetting of the Church of St. Alexander were
less remarkable, because of its far greater distance from the city, and
its comparative inconspicuousness and poverty. Scarcely a more striking
proof exists of the misery and lowness of Rome during many generations in
the Dark Ages than that she should thus have forgotten the very sites of
the churches which had stood around her walls, the outpost citadels of her
faith.

LITERARY NOTICES.

_The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea_. By P.H.
GOSSE. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. With Illustrations. London:
1866.

_The Common Objects of the Seashore; including Hints for an Aquarium_. By
the REV. J.G. WOOD. With Illustrations. London: Routledge & Co. 1857.

We trust that many of our readers, stimulated by the account of an
Aquarium which was given in our number for February, are proposing to set
one up for themselves.

Let no one who has been to Barnum's Museum, to look at what the naming
advertisement elegantly and grammatically terms "an aquaria," fancy that
he has seen the beauty of the real aquarium. The sea will not show its
treasures in a quarter of an hour, or be made a sight of for a quarter of
a dollar. An aquarium is not to be exhausted in a day, but, if favorably
placed where it may have sufficient direct sunshine, and well stocked with
various creatures, day after day developes within it new beauties and
unexpected sights. It becomes like a secret cave in the ocean, where the
processes of Nature go on in wonderful and silent progression, and the coy
sea displays its rarer beauties of life, of color, and of form before the
watching eyes. Look at it on some clear day, when the sun is bright, and
see the broad leaves of ulva, thei