The visitor should now proceed southward into the room called The Bronze Room.  Here are collected the ancient bronzes of which the Museum trustees are in possession; including specimens of the fine castings of ancient Greece, which, with all our modern contrivances, we cannot surpass in the present day.  The cases to the left are filled with a supplementary collection of the remains of ancient Egyptian art, for which space could not be found in the Egyptian room.  These occupy no less than twenty-six cases.  The first eleven cases (1-11) are filled with various sepulchral fragments in various substances, and porcelain and terra-cotta figures, which the visitor who has just emerged from the Egyptian room will again recognise.  Here the strange figures of the Egyptian deities occur again and again; but the visitor should pause before the case 10, 11, in which are deposited models of the Egyptian funeral boats, in stone and wood, from Thebes, and on the fourth shelf a Roman caricature on papyrus, representing lions and goats playing at dice, and foxes driving geese.  In the Egyptian cases are more specimens of cynocephali, jackal, and hawks’ heads, models of the four sepulchral vases, in pottery and wood; more mummy coffins, fragments of inscribed pottery, large Egyptian terra-cotta vases, and in cases 24, 25, are deposited some fragments in terra-cotta, and bronze excavated by Mr. Layard, in ancient Assyria.  Having glanced at these Egyptian cases the visitor should turn at once to the collection of

Greek and Roman bronzes,

which fill the cases numbered from 29 to 112.  The visitor particularly interested in Greek and Roman art, might here spend an entire day.  Bronze, a mixture of copper and tin, was used by the ancients for the manufacture of all kinds of edge-tools, long before iron was smelted from the earth in which it is invariably found; and mineralogists of the present day are surprised to see the works which the ancients executed with a material, that no modern workmen could use as a cutting medium.  Stone masons’ chisels, and fine edged weapons of war, were made of bronze in those days.  The collection of bronzes which the visitor is now about to examine, cannot be said to be a perfect collection; yet it contains some beautiful specimens, and one that is said to be the finest bronze in Europe.  The antiquarian pauses with delight before these marvellous specimens of ancient skill; and reflecting upon the difficulties which beset the caster in bronze, it is astonishing to see the precision and the exquisite finish with which the artists of ancient Greece and Rome performed their labours.  Some of their bronze manufacture were hammered, but most of those works from which we derive a knowledge of their greatness as artists were cast.  Of those colossal bronzes which were studded about Rome, Athens, and Delphos, few remain at the present day.  The material of which they were composed was too valuable to escape the clutch