554 
MERGE TO GYRENE. 
the dampness of the place, and its extreme seclusion, which would 
conspire to prevent the clay from cracking and dropping off, and from 
being rubbed off by intruders ; but we were not prepared to meet with 
inscriptions engraved on so yielding a substance, and certainly not 
to find that, having once been written, they should have remained 
on it down to the present day, as perfect as when they were left 
there by those whose visit they were intended to commemorate. 
They consist, of course, chiefly in a collection of names ; many of 
which are Eoman, and the earliest of the most conspicuous dates 
which we remarked and copied, (for it would take whole days to 
read and copy them all) were those of the reign of Dioclesian. We 
coxdd collect no other fact from those which w e read, than that a 
priest appears to have officiated at the fountain, after Cyrene became 
a Koman colony, whose name and calling (in the form jot &c.) 
are usually written after the name of the visiter. They are in 
general very rudely scratched, with a point of any kind (a sword or 
knife, perhaps, or the stone of a ring,) and often with the point of 
the fingers. We observed a few Arabic inscriptions among the 
rest, but were so much occupied in reading over the Greek ones, 
in order to gain some intelligence respecting the fountain, which 
might serve to throw light upon the period at which the channel 
was excavated, or other questions of interest, that we neglected 
to copy them. There is an appearance in one of the Greek 
inscriptions of allusion to the name of Apollo, the deity to wdiom 
we suppose this fountain to have been sacred ; but the letters are 
not sufficiently clear to establish the fact decidedly, although we 
