548th ordinary GENERAL MEETING. 



HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE ON TUESDAY, 

 DECEMBER 9th, 1913, AT 4.30 r.M. 



The Very Reverend the Dean of Canterbury occupied 

 THE Chair until 5.30, avhen Lieut.-Colonel G. Mackinlay 



TOOK HIS place. 



The Minutes of tlie preceding Meeting were read and confirmed, and 

 the elections were announced of the following Associates and 

 Member : — Miss Edith Grindlev, Mr. Ivan Panin, Miss Selina F. Fox, 

 M.D., B.S., Rev. W. J. Heaton^ B.D., Mr. J. E. Solade-Solomon, Rev. 

 G. H. Lancaster, M.A., F.R.A.S., Rev. W. H. Murray Walton, B.A., 

 Miss Florence Wolsey, Mrs. Annie Scott Dill Maunder (Life), Mr. 

 Robert Kerr, Mr. Wilifred St. George Grantham-Hill, M.D., Mr. W. H. 

 Stanley Monck, M.A., Mr. John T. Burton (Member). 



THE FALL OF BABYLON AND BANLEL V, 30. By Rev. 

 Andrew Craig Robinson, M.A., Donnellan Lecturer, 

 Dublin University, 1912-13. 



BEFORE the archaeological discoveries of recent times the 

 Book of Daniel had been, for probably over 2,000 years, 

 the only extant evidence for the existence of Belshazzar. The 

 Bible was in regard to this matter a single witness, unsupported 

 by any evidence outside itself, and it was open to any rationalist 

 who chose to reject the evidence of the Bible to assert that 

 such a person as Belshazzar never existed, but was merely a 

 creation of the imaginative fancy of the writer of the Book of 

 Daniel. All that, however, is now changed, and by the discovery 

 of the contemporary inscriptions of the Age of Cyrus the 

 reality of the existence of Belshazzar as a personage of history 

 is placed beyond the power of scepticism to deny. 



When Cyrus in his career of conquest in Western Asia 

 marched against the Babylonian Kingdom the name of the 

 Babylonian king was Nabonidus — called by the Greeks 

 Labynetos — and he was in the seventeenth year of his reign. 

 Belshazzar was his son, and was probably associated with his 

 father in the kingly power. His name very frequently appears 

 in the inscriptions as "the son of the king"; and he would 

 seem to have been dearly loved by his father, who in one of Ids 

 inscriptions offers up an earnest prayer to his god for the 



