ok on at the voyagers; and
accordingly I did so."

Though it would appear that the Khan had already paid more than one
visit to the treasures of art and nature collected within the walls of
the British Museum, his description of that institution, "one like which
I had never before heard of," is reserved almost to the last in the
catalogue of the wonders of London; and his remarks on the numberless
novel objects which presented themselves at every turn to his gaze, form
one of the most curious and interesting passages in his journal. The
brilliant plumage of the birds in the gallery of natural history, and
particularly of the humming birds "from the far isles of the Western
Sea," the splendour of which outshone even the gorgeous feathered tribes
of his native East, excited his admiration to the highest
degree--"animals likewise from every country of the earth were placed
around, and might have been mistaken for living beings, from the gloss
of their skins and the brightness of their eyes." The library,
"containing, as I was told, 300,000 volumes, among which were 20,000
Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts," is briefly noticed; and the
sight of the mummies in the Egyptian collection sets the Khan
moralizing, not in the most novel strain, on these relics of bygone
mortality. The sculptures were less to his taste--the Egyptian colossi
are alluded to as "the work in former days, I suppose, of some of the
mummies up stairs;" and the Grecian statues "would appear, to an
unbiassed stranger, a quantity of useless, mutilated _idols_,
representing both men and monsters; but in the eyes of the English, it
is a most valuable collection, said to have cost seven _lakhs_ of
rupees, (L.70,000,) and venerated as containing some of the finest
sculptures in the world. I cannot understand how such importance can be
attached in Europe to this art, since the use of all images is as
distinctly forbidden by the _Tevrat_, (Bible,) as it is by our own
law ... But the strangest sight was in one of the upper rooms, which
contains specimens of extinct monsters, recently discovered in the
bowels of the earth in a fossil state, and supposed to be thousands of
years old. Many men of science pass their whole lives in inventing names
for these creatures, and studying the shape of a broken tooth supposed
to have belonged to them; the science to which this appertains, being a
branch of that relating to minerals, of which there is in the next room
a v