in whose religious rites a similar chest or coffer is to be found.  Herodotus mentions several instances.  Speaking of the festival of Papremis, he says (ii. 63) that the image of the god was kept in a small wooden shrine covered with plates of gold, which shrine was conveyed in a procession of the priests and people from the temple into a second sacred building.  Among the sculptures are to be found bass reliefs of the ark of Isis.  The greatest of the religious ceremonies of the Egyptians was the procession of the shrines mentioned in the Rosetta stone, and which is often found depicted on the sculptures.  These shrines were of two kinds, one a canopy, but the other, called the great shrine, was an ark or sacred boat.  It was borne on the shoulders of priests by means of staves passing through rings in its sides, and was taken into the temple and deposited on a stand.  Some of these arks contained, says Wilkinson (Notes to Herod. II. 58, n. 9), the elements of life and stability, and others the sacred beetle of the sun, overshadowed by the wings of two figures of the goddess Thmei.  In all this we see the type of the Jewish ark.  The introduction of the ark into the ceremonies of Freemasonry evidently is in reference to its loss and recovery; and hence its symbolism is to be interpreted as connected with the masonic idea of loss and recovery, which always alludes to a loss of life and a recovery of immortality.  In the first temple of this life the ark is lost; in the second temple of the future life it is recovered.  And thus the ark of the covenant is one of the many masonic symbols of the resurrection.

ARTS AND SCIENCES, LIBERAL.  In the seventh century, and for many centuries afterwards, all learning was limited to and comprised in what were called the seven liberal arts and sciences; namely, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.  The epithet “liberal” is a fair translation of the Latin “ingenuus,” which means “free-born;” thus Cicero speaks of the “artes ingenuae,” or the arts befitting a free-born man; and Ovid says in the well-known lines,—­

         “Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
    Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros,”—­

To have studied carefully the liberal arts refines the manners, and prevents us from being brutish. And Phillips, in his “New World of Words” (1706), defines the liberal arts and sciences to be “such as are fit for gentlemen and scholars, as mechanic trades and handicrafts for meaner people.”  As Freemasons are required by their landmarks to be free-born, we see the propriety of incorporating the arts of free-born men among their symbols.  As the system of Masonry derived its present form and organization from the times when the study of these arts and sciences constituted the labors of the wisest men, they have very appropriately been adopted as the symbol of the completion of human learning.

ASHLAR.  In builders’ language, a stone taken from the quarries.