Fayal. Pico. Graciosa. Fayal (so called from the extreme abundance of the faya, an indigenous shrub) is the most frequented of all the Azores, after St Michael's, as it has one of the best harbours in the islands, and lies directly in the track of vessels that are crossing the Atlantic in any direction. Its principal town is Villa de Horta, with a population of 7636. The town is defended by two castles and a wall, both in decay, and serving rather for show than strength. The city contains two convents for monks and three for nuns, with eight churches. The bay is two miles in length and threequarters of a mile in breadth, and the depth of water from 6 to 20 fathoms. Though a good roadstead, it is not altogether free from danger in S.S. W. and S. E. winds. The women of this island manufacture fine lace from the agave thread, and till recently produced large quantities of open-work stockings. They also execute carvings in snow-white figtree pith, and carry on the finer kinds of basket-making. A small valley, called Flemengos, still perpetuates the name of the Flemish settlers, who have left their mark on the physical appearance of the inhabitants. Population, 26,264. A considerable quantity of wine used to be exported from Fayal under the name of Fayal wine, which was really the produce of Pico, one of the most remarkable of the Azores. This island is composed of an immense conical mountain, rising to the height of 7613 feet, and bearing every trace of volcanic formation. The soil consists entirely of pulverised lava. All the lower parts of the mountain used to be in the highest state of cultivation, and covered with vine and orange plantations. But in 1852 the vines were attacked by the Oidium fungus and completely destroyed, while the orange-trees suffered almost as much from the Coccus Hesperidum. The people were consequently reduced to want, and forced to emigrate in great numbers. The planting of fig-trees and apricots alleviated the evil, and after a time many of the emigrants returned. Pico also produces a valuable species of wood resembling, and equal in quality to, mahogany. Population, 24,000. Graciosa and St George are two small islands, situated between Fayal and Terceira. Graciosa, as its name imports, is chiefly noted for the extreme beauty of its aspect and scenery. The chief town is Sta Cruz, and the total population 8000. The only manufacture is the St George. burning of bricks. The chief town of St George is Velas, and the population 18,000. Corvo and Flores. The two small islands of Corvo and Flores seem but imperfectly to belong to the group. They lie also out of the usual track of navigators; but to those who, missing their course, are led thither, Flores affords good shelter in its numerous bays. Its poultry is excellent; and the cattle are numerous, but small. It derives its name from the abundance of the flowers that find shelter in its deep ravines. Population of Corvo, 1000, and of Flores, 10,508. See Hartmann's Edrisi; Voyages des Hollandois, tome i.; Astley's Collection, vol. i.; Masson's "Account of St Miguel," in Phil. Trans., 1778; Cook's Second Voyage; Adanson's Voyage to Senegal; History of the Azores, London, 1813, and the review of this work in the Quarterly for 1814; Boid's Azores; London Geographical Journal; A Winter in the Azores, by J. and II. Bullar, 1841; Hartung's Die Azoren in Acusseren Erscheinung u. Geognost. Natur, Leipsic, 1860; Morelet's Iles Açores, 1860; Drouet's Elémens de la Faune Açoréenne, 1861; Drouet's Mollusques Marins des Iles Açores, 1858; Drouet's Lettres Açoriennes, 1862; Ramos (Dr A. G.), Noticia do Archipelago dos Açores, &c., 1871; Godman's Nat. Hist. of the Azores, 1870; "Voyages aux Açores," by Fouqué in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1873; Allgemeine Charac. des Klimas" in Hydro. Mitth. vom Hydr. Bur. der Admir., Berlin, 1873; Kerhallet's Descr. de l'Archip. des Açores, 1851, translated by Totten, 1874. +6 AZOTUS, the name given by Greek and Roman writers to Ashdod, or Eshdod, an ancient city of Palestine, now represented by a few remains in the little village of Esdud, in the pashalik of Acre. It was situated a short distance | inland from the Mediterranean, on the usual military route between Syria and Egypt, about 18 geographical miles N.E. of Gaza. As one of the five chief cities of the Philistines, and the seat of the worship of Dagon, it maintained, down even to the days of the Maccabees, a vigorous, though somewhat intermittent, independence against the power of the Israelites, by whom it was nominally assigned to the territory of Judah. In spite of its being dismantled by Uzziah, and somewhat later, in 731 B.C., captured by the Assyrians, it was strong enough in the next century to resist the assaults of Psammetichus for twenty-nine years. Restored by the Roman Gabinius from the ruins in which it had been left by the Jewish wars, it was presented by Augustus to Salome, the sister of Herod. It became the seat of a bishop early in the Christian era, but seems never to have attained any importance as a town. AZPEITIA, a town of Spain, in the province of Guipuz coa, on the left bank of the Urola, 15 miles S. W. of San Sebastian. The neighbouring country is fertile, and quarries of marble are wrought in the mountains. During the Carlist movement in 1870-74, Azpeitia was the seat of the Guipuzcoan Diputacion, or court for the management of the war; and gunpowder, cartridges, and cannon were manufactured in the town. The famous monastery of San Ignacio, dedicated to Loyola, about a mile distant, was also appropriated for military purposes. Population stated at 2335. AZTECS, the native name of one of the tribes that occupied the table-land of Mexico on the arrival of the Spaniards in America. It has been very frequently employed as equivalent to the collective national title of Nahuatlecas, or Mexicans. The Aztecs came, according to native tradition, from a country to which they gave the name of Aztlan, usually supposed to lie towards the N.W., but the satisfactory localisation of it is one of the greatest difficulties in Mexican history. The date of the exodus from Aztlan is equally undetermined, being fixed by various authorities in the 11th and by others in the 12th century. One Mexican manuscript gives a date equivalent to 1164 A.D. They gradually increased their influence among other tribes, until, by union with the Toltecs, who occupied the table-land before them, they extended their empire to an area of from 18,000 to 20,000 square leagues. The researches of Humboldt gave the first clear insight into the early periods of their history. See MEXICO. AZUNI, DOMENICO ALBERTO, a distinguished jurist and writer on international law, was born at Sassari, in Sardinia, in 1749. He studied law at Sassari and Turin, and in 1782 was made judge of the consulate at Nice. In 1786-88 he published his Dizionario Universale Ragionato della Giurisprudenza Mercantile. In 1795 appeared his systematic work on the maritime law of Europe, Sistema Universale dei Principii del Diritto Maritimo dell' Europa, of which a second edition was demanded in the following year. A French translation by Digeon was published in 1798, and in 1805 Azuni recast the work, and translated it into French. In 1806 he was appointed one of the French commission engaged in drawing up a general code of commercial law, and in the following year he proceeded to Genoa as president of the court of appeal. After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Azuni lived for a time in retirement at Genoa, till he was invited to Sardinia by Victor Emmanuel I., and appointed judge of the consulate at Cagliari, and director of the university library. He resided at Cagliari till his death in 1827. Besides the works above mentioned, Azuni wrote numerous pamphlets and minor works, chiefly on maritime law, an important treatise on the origin and progress of maritime law (Paris, 1810), and an historical, geographical, and political account of Sardinia (1st ed. 1799; 2d, much enlarged, 1802). 173 B B is the second symbol of all European alphabets | It is the sound which has taken the place of bin except those derived from the Cyrillic original (see modern Greek. The same confusion is found in Latin ALPHABET, vol. i. p. 613), such as the Russian. In inscriptions of the 3d and 4th centuries after Christ, when these a modified form, in which only the top of the upper the symbol v represents original b; thus sivi stands for sibi, loop appears, stands as the second letter, with the value livido for libido (see Corssen, Aussprache, &c., i. 131); and of the original sound b; whilst the old symbol B comes still more frequently b appears for v, as bixit for vixit. third with the phonetic value v or w. In Egypt this letter The change would be inconceivable if the symbol v in was originally a hieroglyph for a crane, and afterwards these cases had had the same sound as with us, that of a represented also the sound b. The symbol and its phonetic labiodental. The same indistinctness appeared locally in value were borrowed by the Phoenicians, but not its name, dialects, as is shown by Martial's well-known epigram— as we infer from finding it called in Hebrew beth, i.e., a "Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces, house. In its oldest known Phoenician form the upper Cui nil est aliud vivere quam bibere.” loop only exists in a more or less rounded shape. In different alphabets even the upper loop was gradually opened, so that in the square Hebrew the original form can no longer be detected. The Greeks, when they borrowed it from the Phoenicians, closed up the lower loop as well as the upper for convenience of writing. Sometimes the loops were angular, but more generally they were rounded. There is little variation of the form, except in the old alphabets of Corinth and Corcyra, where the original is hardly recognisable. In old Latin both the rounded and the pointed loops appear. The original sound which this symbol represented, and which it still represents in most European languages, is a closed labial, i.e., one in which perfect closure of the lips is necessary, the sound being heard as the lips open. Like all closed sounds, it is not capable of prolongation. It differs from p, which is also a closed labial, as a sonant from a surd. A sonant is heard when the breath, as it passes through the glottis, is vocalised by the tension or approximation of its edges. When there is no such action of the glottis, mere breath alone passes through; but the explosiveness of the breath when the vocal organs are opened produces a sound, and this is called a surd. The vocal organs are in precisely the same position for p as for b; but in producing p they act upon breath only; in producing b they articulate voice. In the earliest stage to which we can trace back the language spoken by the forefathers of the Indo-European nations, it cannot be certainly proved that the sound b was ever heard at the beginning of a word. Perhaps in this position it may have been sounded indistinctly as a labial V. In English and all Low German languages p has taken the place of original b, which is preserved in Greek and Latin; thus the b in κávvaßis is replaced by p in English "hemp." We do not certainly know the reason of this shifting of sound, which affects all momentary sounds, and which is commonly known in England by the name of "Grimm's law." By the same law English b has taken the place of original bh. Thus our "beech" stands for original "bhaga," which is represented, according to the phonetic laws of the languages, by Greek pnyós and Latin "fagus." In the middle of a Latin word, and consequently generally in the languages derived from the Latin, b represents original bh. There is a tendency among some peoples to allow the b sound to pass into a v, in which the lips are not firmly closed, and so the sound is capable of prolongation, because it does not consist (as b proper does) in the momentary escape of the voice after the lips have been compressed and then opened. This v, in the production of which the lips alone are concerned, must be carefully distinguished from our English v, which is the result of pressure between the upper teeth and lower lip; it is more like our English w. BAADER, FRANZ XAVER VON, an eminent German philosopher and theologian, born 27th March 1765 at Munich, was the third son of F. P. Baader, court physician to the elector of Bavaria. His two elder brothers were both distinguished, the eldest, Clemens, as an author, the second, Joseph, as an engineer. Franz when young was extremely delicate, and from his seventh to his eleventh year was afflicted with a species of mental weakness, which singularly enough disappeared entirely when he was introduced for the first time to the mathematical diagrams of Euclid. His progress thenceforth was very rapid. At the age of sixteen he entered the university of Ingolstädt, where he studied medicine, and graduated in 1782. He then spent two years at Vienna, and returning home, for a short time assisted his father in his extensive practice. This life he soon found unsuited for him, and he decided on becoming a mining engineer. He studied under Werner at Frieburg, travelled through several of the mining districts in North Germany, and for four years, 1792-1796, resided in England. There he became acquainted with the works of Jakob Böhme, and at the same time was brought into contact with the rationalistic 18th-century ideas of Hume, Hartley, and Godwin, which were extremely distasteful to him. For Baader throughout his whole life had the deepest sense of the reality of religious truths, and could find no satisfaction in mere reason or philosophy. "God is my witness," he writes in his journal of 1786, "how heartily and how often I say with Pascal, that with all our speculation and demonstration we remain without God in the world." Modern philosophy he thought essentially atheistic in its tendencies, and he soon grew to be dissatisfied with the Kantian system, by which he had been at first attracted. Particularly displeasing to him was the ethical autonomy, or the position that man had in himself a rule of action, that duty contained no necessary reference to God. This Baader called "a morality for devils," and passionately declared that if Satan could again come upon earth, he would assume the garb of a professor of moral philosophy. The mystical, but profoundly religious, speculations of Eckhart, St Martin, and above all of Böhme, were more in harmony with his mode of thought, and to them he devoted himself. In 1796 he returned from England, and in his passage through Hamburg became acquainted with Jacobi, the Faith philosopher, with whom he was for many years on terms of close friendship. He now for the first time learned something of Schelling, and the works he published during this period were manifestly influenced by that philosopher. Yet Baader is no disciple of Schelling, and probably, in the way of affecting the future course of Schelling's thought, gave out more than he received. Their personal friendship continued till about the year 1822, when Baader's vehement denunciation of modern philosophy in his letter to the Czar of Russia entirely alienated Schelling. While prosecuting his philosophical researches, Baader had continued to apply himself diligently to his profession of engineer. He gained a prize of 12,000 gulden (about £1000) for his new method of employing Glauber's salts instead of potash in the making of glass. From 1817 to 1820 he held the post of superintendent of mines, and was raised to the rank of nobility for his services. He retired from business in 1820, and soon after published one of the best of his works, Fermenta Cognitionis, 6 pts., 1822-25, in which he combats modern philosophy, and recommends the study of J. Böhme. In 1826, when the new university was opened at Munich, he was appointed professor of philosophy and speculative theology. Some of the lectures delivered there he published under the title, Spekulative Dogmatik, 4 pts., 1827-1836. In 1838 he opposed the interference in civil matters of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he belonged, and in consequence was, during the last three years of his life, interdicted from lecturing on the philosophy of religion. He died 23d May 1841. It is extremely difficult to give in moderate compass an adequate view of Baader's philosophy; for he himself generally either gave expression to his deepest thoughts in brief, obscure aphorisms, or veiled them under mystical symbols and analogies. In this respect his style of exposition is not undeserving of Zeller's strictures (Ges. d. deut. Phil., 732, 736). Further, he has no systematic works; his doctrines were for the most part thrown out in short detached essays, in comments on the writings of Böhme and St Martin, or in his extensive correspondence and journals. For his own part, he was distinctly of opinion that philosophy is not as yet capable of reduction to scientific form, and it would consequently be an error to demand from him a rigidly coherent body of truth. At the same time, the general tendency of his thought is very apparent, and there are some salient points which stand out with a clearness sufficient to render possible an outline of his whole course of speculation. In the mode in which he approaches the problems of philosophy, Baader is entirely opposed to the modern speculative spirit, which, beginning with Descartes, has endeavoured to erect a rational or coherent system on the basis of self-consciousness alone, and has protested against the presupposition of anything which can fetter reason, and against the acceptation of any truth which cannot be rationally construed. He starts from the position that human reason is in a corrupt condition, and by itself can never reach the end it aims at, and maintains that we cannot throw aside the presuppositions of faith, church, and tradition. His point of view may, with some truth, be described as Scholasticism; for, like the great scholastic doctors, he believes that theology and philosophy are not opposed sciences, but that reason has to make clear the truths given by authority and revelation. But in his attempt to draw still closer the realms of nature and of grace, of faith and knowledge, of human thought and divine reason, he approaches more nearly to the mysticism of Eckhart, Paracelsus, and Böhme. All self-consciousness, he thinks, is at the same time God-consciousness; our knowledge is never mere scientia, it is invariably con-scientia-a knowing with, consciousness of, or participation in God. Of this knowledge, as of knowledge in general, there are three grades:(1.) Where the thing known impresses itself upon us without or against the will, where the knowledge is necessary, such, e.g., is the knowledge that God is; (2.) Where the thing known is cognised by an act on our part, where knowledge is free,-such, e.g., is the voluntary belief or trust in God; (3.) Where the thing known enters into, and forms part of, the very process of knowing,-such is the speculative knowledge of God, wherein we recognise that without God we are not, and that we know Him only in and through His knowledge of us. The notion of God is thus the fundamental thought of Baader; his philosophy is in all essentials a theosophy, and its first great problem is to determine accurately the nature of the divine Being. Now God, who is, according to Baader, the primary will which lies at the basis of all things, is not to be conceived as mere abstract Being, substantia, but as everlasting process, activity, actus. Of this everlasting process, this self-generation of God, we may distinguish two aspects the immanent or esoteric, and the emanent or exoteric. God has reality only in so far as He is absolute spirit, and only in so far as the primitive will cognises or is conscious of itself can it become spirit at all. But, in this very cognition of self is involved the distinction of knower and known, producer and produced, from which proceeds the power to become spirit. This immanent process of self-consciousness, wherein indeed a trinity of persons is not given but only rendered possible, is mirrored in, and takes place through, the eternal and impersonal idea or wisdom of God, which exists beside, though not distinct from, the primitive will. _Concrete reality or personality is given to this divine Ternar, as Baader calls it, through nature, the principle of self-hood, of individual being, which is eternally and necessarily produced by God. Only in nature is the trinity of persons attained. These processes, it must be noticed, are not to be conceived as successive, or as taking place in time; they are to be looked at sub specie æternitatis, as the necessary elements or moments in the self-evolution of the divine Being. Nor is nature to be confounded with created substance, or with matter as it exists in space and time; it is pure non-being, the mere otherness, alteritas, of God-his shadow, desire, want, or desiderium sui, as it is called by mystical writers. Creation is itself a free and non-temporal act of God's love and will, and on this account its reality cannot be speculatively deduced, but must be accepted as an historic fact. Created beings were originally of three orders the intelligent, or angels; the non-intelligent natural existences; and man, who mediated between these two orders. Intelligent beings are endowed with freedom; it is possible, but not necessary, that they should fall. Hence the fact of the fall is not a speculative, but an historic truth. The angels fell through pride-through desire to raise themselves to equality with God; man fell by lowering himself to the level of nature. Only after the fall of man begins the creation of space, time, and matter, or of the world as we now know it; and the motive of this creation was the desire to afford man an opportunity for taking advantage of the scheme of redemption, for bringing forth in purity the image of God according to which he has been fashioned. The physical philosophy and anthropology which Baader, in connection with this, unfolds in various works, is but little instructive, and coincides in the main with the semi-intelligible utterances of Böhme. In nature and in man he finds traces of the dire effects of sin, which has corrupted both, and has destroyed their natural harmony. As regards ethics, it has been already pointed out that Baader rejects the Kantian or any autonomic system of morals. Not obedience to a moral law, but realisation in ourselves of the divine life, through and in which we have our being, is the true ethical end. man has lost the power to effect this by himself; he has alienated himself from God, and therefore no ethical theory which neglects the facts of sin and redemption is satisfactory or even possible. The history of man and of humanity is the history of the redeeming love of God. The means whereby we put ourselves so in relation with Christ as to receive from Him his healing virtue, are chiefly prayer and But the sacraments of the church, though it must be noted that | His works have been collected and published by a number of his The great difficulty which has been felt by investigators in determining the character and attributes of the god Baal mainly arises from the originally appellative sense of the word, and many obscure points become clear if we remember that when the title became a proper name it might be appropriated by different nations to quite distinct deities, while traces of the wider use of the word as a title for any god, might very well survive even after one god had come The Baal of the Syrians, Phoenicians, and heathen the winter solstice (Joseph., Ant., viii. 5). At Tyre, as among the Hebrews, Baal had his symbolical pillars, one of gold and one of smaragdus, which, transported by phantasy to the Farthest West, are still familiar to us as the pillars of Hercules. The worship of the Tyrian Baal was carried to all the Phoenician colonies. His name occurs as an element in Carthaginian proper names (Hannibal, Asdrubal, &c.), and a tablet found at Marseilles still remains to inform us of the charges made by the priests of the temple of Baal for offering sacrifices. A much-disputed question is the relation of the sun-god Baal to Moloch-Saturn. Moloch is certainly called Baal in Jer. xix. 5, xxxii. 35, but the word may here retain its appellative force. It is, however, the theory of many scholars, especially worked out by Movers, that Moloch is only a special development of Baal, representing the destructive heat instead of the life-giving power of the sun. Another question of some nicety concerns the precise character and mutual relations of the female deities associated with Baal. In the Old Testament, as we have seen, Baal is generally associated with Ashera, but sometimes with Ashtoreth or Astarte (in the plural Ashtaroth, associated with the plural Baalim, 1 Sam. vii. 4, &c.) As Ashtoreth is constantly associated with the Phoenician Baal, it was long customary to identify Ashera with her, a theory opposed to the fact that Ashtoreth is represented as a chaste goddess. The key to the difficulty is probably to be sought in the Assyrian mythology, where we find that the planet Venus was worshipped as the chaste goddess Istar, when she appeared as a morning star, and as the impure Bilit or Beltis, the Mylitta of Herod. (i. 199), when she was an evening star. These two goddesses, associated yet contrasted, seem to correspond respectively to the chaste Ashtoreth and the foul Ashera, though the distinction between the rising and setting planet was not kept up among the Western Semites, and the nobler deity came at length to be viewed as the goddess of the moon. Finally, we may mention as a special form of Baal the Philistine Baal-zebub, or "Baal of flies," a conception which has more than one analogy in Greek religion, especially the Zevs 'Aπóμvios at Olympia. The use of the word Beelzebub, or rather, with a slight change, Beelzebul, by the later Jews, to denote the prince of the devils (Mat. xii. 24), is easily understood on the principle laid down in 1 Cor. x. 20. For further information as to Baal, the reader may consult works on Syrian and Phoenician religion. Of older books, the most celebrated is Selden's De diis Syris; of recent books, Movers's Die Phönizier, i., a work full of learning, but deficient in method and logic. The valuable contributions to the subject from Assyrian research are partly brought together by Schrader in the Stud. und Krit. for 1874, pp. 335, sqq. (W. R. s.) BAALBEC, or BA'ALBAK, an ancient city of Syria, celebrated for the magnificence of its ruins, which, with the exception of those at Palmyra, are the most extensive in that region. The derivation of the latter part of the name is still dubious, some boldly identifying it with the Egyptian baki, a city, and others comparing it with the Arabic bakha, "to be thronged." It is almost certain that the Greek Heliopolis was intended to be a translation of the The town is pleasantly situated on the lowest declivity of the Anti-Libanus, at the opening of a small valley into the plain of El-Buká'a or Sahlat Ba'albak, about 35 miles N.N.W. of Damascus, and 38 S.S.E. of Tripoli. The inhabitants have a saying, Burton informs us, that it lies on the balance, meaning that it occupies the flattened crest of a watershed. By Russegger its height above the sea is given at 3496 Paris feet, and by Schubert at 3572,the mean of the observations being 3584 Paris feet, or 4502 name. English feet. A small stream, rising in the immediate neighbourhood from a fountain known as Ra'as-el Ayn, is employed for the irrigation of the valley. The origin of Baalbec is lost in remote antiquity, and the historical notices of it are very scanty. The silence of the classical writers respecting it would seem to imply that previously it had existed under another name, and various attempts have been made to identify it with certain places mentioned in the Bible, as with Baalgad, "in the valley of Lebanon" (Josh. xi. 17); Baalath, one of Solomon's cities (1 Kings ix. 18); Baal-hamon, where Solomon had a vineyard (Cant. viii. 11.); and "the plain of Aven" (BikathAven, Amos i. 5), referred to by Amos; but none of these identifications seem to rest on any very solid support, though they have each in turn met the approval of some writer of authority. In the absence of more positive information, we can only conjecture that its situation on the high road of commerce between Tyre and Palmyra and the farther East rendered it at an early period a seat of wealth and splendour. It is not at all improbable that the statement of Macrobius in his Saturnalia may be founded on the tradition of a real and potent connection between Heliopolis and its Egyptian namesake. It is mentioned by Josephus (Ant., xiv. 3, 4), Pliny (Nat. Hist., v. 22), and Ptolemy, and coins of the city have been found belonging to the reigns of almost all the emperors from Nerva to Gallienus. John Malala of Antioch ascribes the erection of a great temple to Jupiter (vaòv To Aù péyav) at Heliopolis to Antoninus Pius; and two votive inscriptions still exist on the bases of columns in the Greater Temple, belonging to the age of Septimius Severus. From the civic coins of the reigns of Nerva and Hadrian we learn that the city had been constituted a colony by Julius Cæsar, and that it was the seat of a Roman garrison in the time of Augustus, and obtained the Jus Italicum from Septimius Severus (Ulpian, De Censibus, lib. i.) Some of the coins of this last emperor bear the figure of a temple and the legend COL.HEL.I.O.M.H., Colonia Heliopolis Jovi Optimo Maximo Heliopolitano; while one of the reign of Valerian has the representation of two temples. It is evident that in the early Christian centuries Heliopolis was one of the most flourishing seats of Pagan worship, and the Christian writers draw strange pictures of the morality of the place. In 297 it became the scene of the martyrdom of Gelasinus. The Emperor Constantine, according to Sozomen, issued a rescript against the licentious rites of the people, and founded a basilica among them; but, on the accession of Julian, the Pagan population broke out into violent persecution, and the city became so notorious for its hostility to Christianity, that Christians were banished thither from Alexandria as a special punishment. Theodosius the Great is said to have turned "the temple of Balanius, the Trilithon," into a Christian church, and the city seems to have been the seat of a bishop. From the accounts of Oriental writers, Baalbec seems to have continued a place of importance down to the time of the Moslem invasion of Syria. They describe it as one of the most splendid of Syrian cities, enriched with stately palaces, adorned with monuments of ancient times, and abounding with trees, fountains, and whatever contributes to luxurious enjoyment. After the capture of Damascus it was regularly invested by the Moslems, and after a courageous defence, at length capitulated. The ransom exacted by the conquerors was 2000 ounces of gold, 4000 ounces of silver, 2000 silk vests, and 1000 swords, together with the arms of the garrison. The city afterwards became the mart for the rich pillage of Syria; but its prosperity soon received a fatal blow from the caliph of Damascus, by whom it was sacked and dismantled, and the principal in |