Professor Lyon's Lecture.

Prof. Lyon's lecture yesterday was on the "Cuneiform Inscriptions an the Psalter." The Babylonians and Assyrians had many hymns and psalms which resemble the psalms of the Old Testament in form, in tone and in expression. The most striking resemblances occur in the class of psalms called penitential. Several of these productions were translated. When the Jews were exiled at Babylon in the sixth century B. C., they could not fail to be impressed by the splendid ritual of which these psalms were a part, and it is not unlikely that they may have adopted some of them, with the necessary changes in favor of monotheism, into their own psalm-book. The stereopticon views presented temples, sacrificial laws, and psalms, the Babylonian in the cuneiform character and the Hebrew in the Hebrew character. Specially noteworthy was the fragment of a Babylonian alliterative hymn, divided into paragraphs of five lines each. all the lines in a given paragraph beginning with the same sign or syllable. The hymn was in praise of a restorer of the great temple at Babylon.