The Romance of the Dump Heap.

Archaeology is the really romantic thing in this generation, now that war has been turned into a dismal science, and no, more strange countries--only wastes of Arctic snow--remain to be explored--The record of the latest discoveries of the Harvard Egyptian Expedition, under Dr. George A. Reisner, as related by him to an Associated Press correspondent at Cairo, is surely a story of romance. The expedition had gone far up the Nile, to Napata, in the province of Dongola, on that stretch of the great river where, after its plunge at the Mograt cataract, it turns southward, to plunge once more and to bend northward again at old Dongola. This is the region where ancient Egypt merged into Ethiopia, and where the architectural and other remains of antiquity betray the presence of kings more ancient still than those who built the temples of Napata. Where does the romance enter, in the researches which Dr. Reisner carried on here? In the fact that the explorer finds the ancient statues of the Ethiopian kings in the very place that he was clearing to make a dump heap for his rubbish. Promoting this spot, therefore, to the place of honor in his diggings he clears a still more distant and unregarded place for his dump--and there finds more wonderful things still. In archaeology, chance is often the great baffler of the explorer, but sometimes it is his chiefest aid. In this case it certainly was a great assistance, and Dr. Reisner's ten Ethiopian kings, picked up in fragments but virtually intact when put together, will always be the monarchs of the dump heap in archaeological history.

And it was in the dump heap that they were put by the Egyptian reconstructors of the temple after a destruction of it subsequent to 600 B. C. The Egyptians of that period, regarding themselves as moderns of the moderns, and certainly the most up-to-date thing then existing, had no respect whatever for the monuments of the Ethiopian period. Old rubbish to the dump. Ten great kings, each perhaps in his own way as great as Ozymandias, king of kings, were "scrapped" relentlessly by those moderns of long ago--scrapped in contemptuous fragments. Nothing more forever of Tirhaka the magnificent, of Tanut-Amon the irresistible! They were consigned to the deepest dump. But here comes a delving American scholar, from far-away around the earth, and, seeking for a place to put his own rubbish, inpinges upon the rubbish of the up-to-date builder of twenty-six centuries gone; he finds the pieces of Tirhaka and Tanut-Amon, reconstitutes them with care, and promotes them to the chiefest honor among the denizens of Napata. Could there be a more romantic rebirth than that?

We have but the slightest sketch of the operations of these Harvard delvers on the margin of the Nubian desert. The world will await with interest their fuller and more authoritative story. But we know that at least they have won an archaeological victory, even if they have won it at the hands of the god of chance. They were at least earnestly "on the job" to take advantage of any gifts that that god might bring them. Boston Transcript.