4 NOVEMBER 1916, Page 32

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. By Edgar J.

Banks. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1•50 net.)—Mr. Banks, one of the able American archaeologists who have worked in Babylonia, has written a popular book of groat merit. Macaulay's schoolboy would doubtless have named tho " seven wonders " offhand, but Mr. Banks confesses that he could not do so and that his learned friends wore equally ignorant. The seven wonders, as selected by Antipater of Sidon about 200 a.c., were the Great Pyramid of Khufu or Cheops, the walls of Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the tomb of Mausolus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria. Mr. Banks gives the history of each, with much interesting matter from Arab chronicles and other sources. It is sad to know that the Knights of St. John, and not the Turks, in 1542 broke open and defaced the actual tomb in the Mausoleum ; the chariot group on the top, now in the British Museum, had fallen in 1402. The Great Pyramid, the oldest and least artistic of the seven wonders, alone survives.