rena has been
uncovered, the explorations have reduced the houses on the Rue Monge to
but little more than tall facades. From under their rear walls emerge
the amphitheatre and some of the curving rows of seats in stone, the
latter much restored. In the walls of the arena are two rectangular,
barred entrances, and one lower, arched one, from which we may imagine
the gladiators or the wild beasts emerging. The floor of the arena is
left in a roughly gravelled condition; at present, nothing more
formidable is to be encountered there than three very little French boys
making mud-pies in the puddle formed by last night's rain. A fourth,
still smaller, is at some distance, absorbed in some dry engineering of
his own at the foot of the old wall. Seated in the steep little green
park which rises above the terraced seats, crowned with trees and
shrubberies, and vocal with a prodigious twittering of birds, are three
or four idle, bare-headed young women in "shirt-waists," one with a
lover, and an old gentleman with a red ribbon reading his morning
newspaper. The traveller can place himself on one of the benches in this
pleasant little greenery, look down on the infantile engineers below,
and make appropriate reflections.

A still more important architectural feature of the ancient city was the
great aqueduct which supplied the baths of the palace on the river, its
fountains and those of the populous quarter around it. The waters of
three or four small streams to the south of the capital were united and
conveyed in a channel, lined with cement, 19,100 metres in length, which
traversed the slopes of the hills on the eastern side of the Bievre, and
remains of which have been found at various points. To cross the valley
and the stream, an aqueduct was constructed on arches at the locality
which took the name of Arcueil, and where some of the masonry is still
preserved in modern construction, "this aqueduct being some four hundred
metres long and fifty (?) high." It is computed that a supply of
twenty-four cubic metres of water was furnished every twenty-four hours.
Remains of other and smaller aqueducts have been discovered at various
points in the city. At Passy, surrounding the present Trocadero, there
were springs of mineral waters, which were conveyed to the city by
terra-cotta pipes, passing along the banks of the Seine. In 1781, in the
gardens of the Palais-Royal, were discovered the remains of great basins
which are supposed