1820.] Memoirs of the Literary Society of Manchester. 205 



her days in warlike expeditions and public works. After an 

 unsuccessful expedition into India, she died miraculously, leav- 

 ing the kingdom to her son Ninyas, who began a course of effe- 

 mmate sloth and luxury, which his successors followed for 30 

 generations, without leaving a single fact ibr history, till the 

 time of Sardanapalus, whose vices roused the indignation of 

 Belesys, the Babylonian, and Arbaces, the Mede. They rebelled, 

 besieged him in Nineveh, and drove him to the desperate expe- 

 dient of burning himself, his haram, and his treasures, to avoid 

 falling into their hands. With him ended the Assyrian monarchy, 

 according to Ctesias. 



It is needless to observe that this account of Ctesias is utterly 

 irreconcilable with the Old Testament history. It is equally 

 devoid of probability. A series of 30 generations of kings sunk, 

 in absolute indolence, allowed to reign without molestation, is 

 utterly incredible. Our author is of opinion that Ninus, Semi- 

 iamis, and Sardanapalus, were the names of the Assyrian 

 deities, and that the fiction originated from a practice common 

 with the ancients of assigning the origin of nations to gods, and 

 contriving a set of actions suitable to their conceptions of these 

 divine kings. This opinion he supports with much ingenuity, 

 and a great deal of learning ; and his solution of the difficulty is 

 fully as plausible as any hitherto proposed. But 1 cannot see 

 any reason for putting any confidence in the account of a writer 

 who lived so long after the events which he attempts to describe 

 as Ctesias, unless he had favoured us with the contemporary 

 authorities upon which his supposed facts were founded. Now 

 this, in the present circumstances of the case, would have been 

 obviously impossible. 



XIX. A Descriptive Account of the several Processes which am 

 iisnally pursued in the Manufacture of the Article known in 

 Commerce by the Name of Tin-plate. By Samuel Parkes, F.L.S. 

 &c. — This is an interestmg and entertaining paper. The author 

 has a turn for describing manufactures, and the public are 

 already indebted to him for several other manufactures of rather 

 an interesting nature, of which he has drawn up a description. 

 Indeed his Essays, if, in a subsequent edition, he would reduce 

 them to half their present size, by omitting all the extraneous 

 matter, would be a most valualjle book, and more profitable to 

 the author than it is likely to be under its present form. 



The art of making tin-plate, or of covering plates of iron with 

 tin, seems to have been estabhshed in Bohemia before it existed 

 any where else in Europe. About the beginning of the 17th 

 century, mines of tin were discovered in Saxony, and the Electot 

 })ad the address to transplant the tin-plate manufactory to hit 

 own kingdom. In the year 1666, when Mr. Andrew Yarringtoa 

 visited these manufactories, they were of such extent as to 

 employ ubcut 8U,UU0 workmen ^ and the tin-plates v/evQ sent to 



