New York.] CENTRAL PARK. 91 the Casino, devoted to the refreshment of visitors by appetising lunches; the Ramble, thirtysix acres of thickets, streams, and dells, threaded by romantic foot-paths; Mount St. Vincent, where the buildings erected for the Mother House of the Sisters of Charity have been replaced by more modern edifices; and the Belvedere, a quaint and massive stone castle in Norman architecture, on a lofty hill, overlooking the city and its picturesque suburbs. The Mall, a splendid esplanade 1,212 feet long and 208 feet wide, bordered by double lines of graceful American elms, and devoted to the purposes of a popular promenade, extends from the Marble Arch to the Terrace, and is adorned with bronze statues of Fitz-Greene Halleck, the poet; Sir Walter Scott, copied from Sir John Steel's model at Edinburgh, and presented by Scottish New Yorkers; Shakspere, erected on the 300th anniversary of his birth, and one of the best statues American art has produced; and Robert Burns, designed by Sir John Steel, and presented by Scottish Americans in 1880. In other parts of the Park are statues of Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts statesman and orator; Prof. S. F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph; a soldier of the Seventh Regiment, commemorating the members of that corps who died in the war of 1861-5; and several allegorical and genre statues and groups. Their respective countrymen have presented the Park with colossal busts of Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich von Schiller, and Giuseppe Mazzini. At the end of the Mall is the Terrace, a sumptuous pile of light Albert freestone, with richly-frescoed and carved arcades and corridors, costly and elaborate stone screenwork, emblematic statuary, and other details appropriate for the most imposing ornament of the Park. Below the Terrace is the Esplanade, paved with marble, reaching to the shore of the lake, and adorned with the famous Bethesda Fountain, the finest work of the kind in America. High in the air, apparently hardly touching the rocky top, is the colossal Angel, bearing lilies and blessing the water, which flows downward, half-veiling the allegorical figures of Temperance, Purity, Health, and Peace, and then plashes into a huge basin below. The statues were cast in bronze at Munich. Washing the mimic sea-wall of the Esplanade are the clear aqueduct waters of Central Lake, on which scores of dainty little boats are floating, propelled by Corkonian or County Kerry gondoliers, and traversing the twenty acres of water, through the straits under the Flower Bridge and the Balcony Bridge, and along the iron-bound coast of the Ramble. At evening, when the boats carry coloured lights, the scene is suggestive of Venice or the Golden. Horn. In winter, the lake and its smaller comrades elsewhere in the Park are crowded with people, the water having previously been lowered to a depth of four feet. Thousands of merry skaters, whirling along over the clear ice, brilliant in costume and complexion, laugh at the northern winter, and fill the air with gladness. In the fashionable season the parade of carriages entering the Fifth Avenue gate on a pleasant afternoon is one of the great sights of New York, and exhibits the aristocracy of the city in their great family equipages, as satisfactorily as a Sunday afternoon stroll on Fifth Avenue shows them -on foot. The retaining and receiving reservoirs of the water-supply of New York are situated in the upper part of the Park, and have a capacity of 1,180,000,000 gallons. There is a beautiful but thinly populated region in Westchester County, about forty miles from the city, abounding in wooded hills and crystalline lakes, and traversed by the Croton river. From this stream an aqueduct of stone, brick, and cement descends to New York, carrying 115,000,000 gallons of water daily, and filling the great reservoirs in the Park and the huge old Distributing Reservoir, in heavy Egyptian architecture, built on Murray Hill (Fifth Avenue). There are over 400 miles of iron mains under the streets, distributing water to the houses, the daily consumption being 95,000,000 gallons. The works were begun in 1842, and have cost more than £5,000,000. The deep and picturesque defile of the Harlem river, within the city limits, is crossed by the High Bridge, a magnificent granite aqueduct, 124 feet high and 1,460 feet long, on thirteen arches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was chartered in the year 1870, and occupied its present spacious quarters in 1880. This edifice, erected by the city, stands in Central Park, near the Fifth Avenue, and is of brick and sandstone, in Gothic architecture. The plans are recorded by which this shall become an integral part of a vast pile of buildings, covering an area of several acres, and devoted to the uses of the Museum. There are several large and small picture-galleries, the chief of which, lighted from an arched roof of glass, is 109 feet long and 95 feet wide. The ancient pictures here preserved, numbering over 200, are mainly of the German and Dutch schools of art-Rubens, Van Dyck, and others—with a few French, English, and Italian pictures, and specimens of Murillo and Velasquez. Many American pictures may also be seen, including an inchoate collection of works by deceased artists. There are large numbers of paintings owned by wealthy gentlemen of New York, which are from time to time sent to the Museum, and hung in the galleries of the loan collection, for the people to study and admire. The chief feature of the institution, however, is the Cesnola Collection of antiquities, found in the ruined cities and tombs of Cyprus, including 4,000 pieces of terra-cotta ware, 1,700 pieces of Greek and Phoenician glass-ware, numerous bits of gold and silver jewellery and ornaments, and several thousand other articles-statuettes, copper utensils, lamps, weapons, and various votive and mortuary pieces. General di Cesnola, an Italian noble, who fought in the American National Army during the war of 1861-5, was sent out as consul to Larnaka, Cyprus, in 1865. During the next seven years he superintended extensive excavations on the sites of the ancient Greek and Phoenician cities, Idalium, Paphos, Citium, and Golgos, from which he unearthed the materials of this collection. The British Museum and the young Metropolitan Museum competed for the prize, and the latter was the winner. Various other collections and curiosities are displayed here, and the sphere of the enterprise is continually widening. Visitors are admitted without charge on four days of each week. Cleopatra's Needle, a monolithic obelisk, the companion to the one now in London, a work coëval with Moses, and now 3,400 years old, was presented by Ismail Pasha to the city of New York in 1877, and carried from Alexandria to its new home three years later, in the hold of an Egyptian steamer. It stands upon a rocky knoll in Central Park, near the Museum of Art, where its ancient inscriptions, far antedating the arts of Greece and the legions of Rome, look down upon the noisy civilisation of the New World in strongest contrast. This was one of the twin obelisks set up by King Thothmes III. before the Temple of the Sun-god, at Heliopolis, and which were brought down to Alexandria during the domination of the Romans. New York.] THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. 93 The American Museum of Natural History, incorporated in 1869, occupies one wing of a future great pile of buildings nearly opposite the Museum of Art, across the Park. The corner-stone of the structure was laid by President Grant, in 1874; and the work was finished late in 1877, when the rich collections THE BELVEDERE, CENTRAL PARK. animals, marbles and building stones, specimens of wood, and wax fruits. The second storey is devoted to mounted birds, arranged in geographical order, and to archæological curiosities, including the Squier Collection from the Mississippi Valley, the De Morgan Collection of stone implements from the Valley of the Somme (France), the Bement Collection from the stone age of Denmark, and extensive lines of antiquities from the Swiss lake-dwellings, the islands of the Pacific, and the Indians of the prairies and the Rocky Mountains. The third storey is devoted to geological specimens; and the fourth storey is divided into small |