NEGLECT OF THE PRESERVATION OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.

A writer in the London Athenæum, writing from Alexandria, endeavors to convince those who profess an interest in Egyptian antiquities, that if their present neglect continues, nothing will remain of the stupendous relics now lying over the land, but a quantity of pulverized fragments. The colossal statue at Memphis, said to belong to the British Museum, for years depended on the precarious protection of an old Arab woman, who was continually expecting and claiming a small salary of five or six pounds per annum as guardian. She received about so much from a variety of consuls, for a time, but the payment was at last discontinued, and, from what was told her, she based her hopes on the learned or the powerful in England. "But the learned and the powerful never, I suppose," says the writer, "heard of her, and she died, leaving the statue in charge of her son, who, in his turn, seems to live in hope. There is little prospect of his getting any thing, however; and very probably, in spite of his unrewarded zeal, the magnificent statue—by far the finest in Egypt—will ere long be burnt for lime. The neighboring pyramid of Dashour is being, as I have already said, worked as a quarry, and I shall be very much surprised if this handy block of stone escape notice." He suggests the formation of a committee, consisting of the principal consuls and residents in Egypt, to watch over the preservation of the monuments of the country, and to be supplied, by governments or by the voluntary contributions of the learned, with the funds necessary to pay guardians and inspectors.

A very valuable museum of Egyptian antiquities we believe is now on the way to the United States; but it embraces no such great works as have been transported to Rome and Paris. Is it not worth while for the New-York merchants to set up in Union or Washington Square, the great statue of Memphis?

Or it would not be altogether inappropriate for the Smithsonian Institution to have it imported into Washington. How much the diffusion of "knowledge" would be promoted by such a movement it is not easy to say: but a figure of this kind on Capitol Hill would have such an effect on our eloquence! and our juvenile poets could go there and in its shade invoke the presence of twenty centuries.