He may usefully recapitulate the points of his present visit.  He has been travelling for hours amongst the wrecks of the remote past.  Over vast tracts of land, where now the Turk lazily dreams away the hours, or moves only to destroy the remains of the ancient civilisation of his Asiatic provinces.  Throughout this, his third visit, the visitor has been exploring the revelations of the past, written upon the face of Turkish provinces.  The bigotry with which the explorers of Thebes, Nimroud, and Xanthus had to contend, is written in their histories of their labours.  How when the human-headed bull was disclosed by the pick-axes of the Chaldaeans, the Arabs scampered off, and how all the natives thought that Nimroud himself—­the mighty hunter—­was rising grimly from the earth, are points in the discovery of this treasure which all should read.  The vigour with which English and French explorers have possessed themselves of the treasures of ancient Egypt, the master-pieces from the Parthenon, the strange stone revelations of Lycia, and the majestic colossi of ancient Assyria, contrasts forcibly with the indolence of the Turk, who sat at hand to wonder at the enthusiasm of his Christian visitors.  No more pitiful exhibition of a national character could be furnished by any passage in the history of the world than that which describes the ignorant and superstitious Turk grinding the sculpture of the Parthenon into mortar for his dwelling house.  Truly, in all respects, is this a matter to be pondered by the general visitor, as he retreats from the national Museum for the third time.  He has not passed an idle day here, wandering amid sphinxes, and tombs, and temples, and ancient gods.  From the confusion he may gather something that shall not be altogether a useless subject for reflection as he wanders homewards.  He may link himself with the remote past, recognise the elements of modern society in these stone revelations of the remote history of the world, feel the vibration of the great human heart coming to him even from the bowels of Egypt’s pyramids.  There he has their family histories written on their tombstones by weeping relatives; their religion, with all its debasing idolatry, strong in death, exhibiting pleasantly the firmness of their faith; splendid sarcophagi tardily wrought from massive rock, yet perseveringly accomplished in the strong conviction that the dead would shake off the mummy bandages, discharge the natron from their pores, reclaim their scattered intestines, pass the brain back through the nose into the skull, and once more feel quickening blood in the veins.  Proudly men of the passing century look back upon all this worship of animals, upon the Egyptian Anubis, and the intestine genii with their animal heads; but even here, in this field of speculation, where the historian’s hand wanders unsteadily about his page, and all wears a mythical air, pulses of human emotion are felt that assure us of the remote past.  Strange that the chief chapters of ancient Egypt’s history should have been written for moderns by her undertakers!