Hastings. It was also the Romans who introduced the custom of building the keeps, or dongeon, upon those lofty mounds, in such a manner, that the favourite iron battering ram of the Romans could be of no avail, for want of ground to place them upon. Amongst the most effective missiles of antiquity must be reckoned an artificial fire, called the Greek or Saracenic fire: it obtained its latter name from having been used by the Saracens in their combats with the Christians during the Crusades. The manner of making this destructive missile, as stated by Leonardi da Vinci, was, by mixing over a fire, the charcoal of willow, with nitre, brandy, resin, sulphur, pitch, and camphor; or, according to another formula, it was made of sulphur, naptha, pitch, gum, and bitumen: whilst these mixtures were hot, a woollen cord was plunged into them, and afterwards made into balls; these balls were sometimes armed with iron spikes, to enable them to hold where they fell-this was called by the Greeks the marine fire, on account of the property it possessed of burning under water, nor was any other method known of extinguishing it than by sand moistened with vinegar, or by smothering it with dust. This fire was thrown from ramparts in large boilers, or discharged by darts and arrows, twisted with tow, and strongly impregnated with the composition. It was used both by the Greeks and Romans, at sea, as well as on land, and always threw the greatest confusion amongst cavalry; and is also described as making the most awful appearance by night, whilst flying through the air, producing the brilliancy of lightning, with the noise of thunder. But the superior inventions of later times have entirely destroyed the value of the most boasted modes of ancient warfare, having rendered their fortresses no longer tenable, and their choicest engines uncertain and futile, when compared with the effect of bomb-shells and Congreve rockets, fired with all the precision of modern gunnery.

Suffolk.

BURGH CASTLE is situated not far from Yarmouth, and is one of the small number of Roman fortresses in Great Britain, of which there are any walls remaining. This camp, the Garianonum of the Romans, is placed at the confluence of two rivers, the Yare and the Waveney, upon a gentle eminence, and is supposed to have been founded by Publius Ostorius Scapula, the conqueror of the Iceni, during the reign of Claudius. It would appear that the waters of the Yare once washed its western side, from the circumstances of the fort not having a wall on that side, and the occasional discovery of iron rings, pieces of anchors, marine shells, &c. on digging the ground close up to the fort. This camp forms a parallelogram of one hundred and eight yards on the two longest sides, which lie to the north and south. The length of the ends is about fifty yards, and the whole of the area within contains something more than four acres, or about five acres, two roods, including the ramparts. The walls, as was usual among the buildings of the Romans, are ornamented with parallel lines of brick or tiles at stated intervals, running through the whole length of the masonry, and are strengthened in several places with circular bastions or buttresses of solid stone work, about forty feet in circumference, and which also have the same regular courses of tile or brick; the thickness of wall is about nine feet, and its height fourteen. By the fall of one of the bastions at the south end, we perceive that the foundation of the masonry is laid upon oak planks two inches in thickness, well covered over with a layer of mortar, and immediately upon this are placed the first layers of stone. Burgh Castle has been one of the camps called Castra Stativa, or permanent camps, where it was intended or necessary that the forces

should remain stationary, either for the winter, or a longer time. The Romans had also their summer camps, or Castra Estiva, which were of much slighter construction; seldom having any fosse or rampart, but merely an entrenchment or breastwork of earth hastily thrown up, and generally about five feet high: such camps were only for a short stay, or as a resting place on a march.—It is impossible to turn from the contemplation of a camp of such antiquity as this, without contrasting the sanguinary mode of making war among the ancients, with those improvements in modern warfare, which, at first sight, would seem to have increased the destruction of the human race, as the means became more powerful and multiplied, rather than the contrary effect which those increased and improved means have produced; for if we compare the battles of the ancients with those of later times, the difference in the numbers of the slain, is astonishing. A celebrated French writer remarks, that the modern European battles appear only as skirmishes when compared with the engagements of the Asiatics, who have made little or no improvements since the oldest times. They come together in prodigious crowds, wholly undisciplined, and mingling together, meet man to man, and the battle rages with equal fury from the beginning till the conclusion, whilst any of the combatants keep their ground. The great numbers that were brought into the field during the earlier ages almost exceed belief. We find it stated in Diodorus Siculus, that Sesostris, when proceeding on his expedition into Upper Asia, had with him six hundred thousand foot, twenty-seven thousand horse, and twenty-four thousand chariots. In the same author, the amount of the armies of Ninus and Semiramis is made between two and three millions of men. In Herodotus, we learn that Darius led seven hundred thousand of his people against the Scythians; and when Xerxes invaded Greece, his army is said, by the same writer, to have amounted to above five millions-two millions one hundred thousand of which were land forces, the rest acted by sea. Nor is it in prophane history alone that we find these immense armies mentioned, for we read in the Scriptures, that the Jewish monarch Asa, entirely destroyed an army of one million of men that had invaded Judea, under their prince and leader Zera; and many other instances of the same nature frequently occur in the sacred text. If we turn to the Asiatics of later times, we find them precisely in the footsteps of their predecessors; and the mind revolts at the disgusting recital of the wholesale murders committed on each other by the various nations of that vast Continent. For example:—when Ghenghis Khan took Karazm, the capital of Mahommed, two

millions of persons were destroyed, one million sold for slaves, and ninety thousand shot to death with arrows, in cold blood, on the plains of Nesa. In the cities of Nishabûr and Tûs, with their territories, one million seven hundred and forty thousand persons were massacred, and in the district of Herat, one million six hundred thousand suffered in like manner. In his last battle with the rebels at Taugut, three hundred thousand men perished; and to conclude the shocking detail, this same Ghengis Khan, during the first fourteen years of the Mongul empire, according to the Chinese records, destroyed eighteen millions of persons.

The finest remains of Roman stations in Great Britain, where the walls are yet partially standing, are to be found at Richborough in Kent; Silchester in Hampshire; Pevensey in Sussex; Burgh Castle in Suffolk; and Porchester in Hampshire.

Ꭰ