"Another tomb with perfect stairway has been discovered, but it is much more plain. Foundations of villas, and baths with leaden pipes in great quantity, have been exposed. I hear to-day that the government has ordered the excavation of a mile and a half of the old Via Latina in this neighborhood, and much interesting discovery is anticipated."
We will only add to our correspondent's account the fact that the Basilica of St. Stephen had been sought for in vain previously to this discovery by Signor Fortunati. The great explorer, Bosio, failed to find it, and Aringhi, writing just two hundred years ago, says, "Formerly upon the Via Latina stood the church erected with great pains in honor of the most blessed Stephen, the first martyr, by Demetria, a woman of pristine piety; of which the Bibliothecarius, in his account of Pope Leo the First, thus makes mention: 'In these days, Demetria, the handmaid of God, made the Basilica of St. Stephen on the Latin Way, at the third mile-stone, 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 archæological 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, their vivid green sparkling with the brilliant bubbles of oxygen which float up to the surface like the bubbles of Champagne; see the glades of the pink coralline, or the purple Iceland-moss covered with its plum-like down, in the midst of which the transparent bodies of the shrimps or the yellow or banded shells of the sea-snails are lying half hid. See on the brown rock, whose surface is covered with the softest growth, the white anemone stretching its crown of delicate tentacles to the light; or the long winding case of the serpula, from the end of which appear the purple, brown, or yellow feathers that decorate the head of its timid oc-
