described by Mr. Crawfurd, the historian of the Indian Archipelago, Kæmpfer made but a short stay. In the capital, which formed the extreme limit of his knowledge, he observed a great number of temples and schools, adorned with pyramids and columns of various forms, covered with gilding. Though smaller than European churches in dimension, they were, he thought, greatly superior in beauty, on account of their numerous bending and projecting roofs, gilded architraves, porticoes, pillars, and other ornaments. In the interior, the great number of gilded images of Buddha, seated in long rows upon raised terraces, whence they seemed to overlook the worshippers, increased the picturesque character of the building. Some of these statues were of enormous size, exceeding not only that Phidian Jupiter, represented in a sitting posture, which, had it risen, must have lifted up the roof of the temple, but even those prodigious statues of Osymandyas, on the plains of Upper Egypt, which look like petrifactions of Typhæus and Enceladus, the Titans who cast Pelion upon Ossa. One of these gigantic images, one hundred and twenty feet long, represents Buddha reclining in a meditative posture, and has set the fashion in Siam for the attitude in which wisdom may be most successfully wooed.
In sailing down the Meinam he was greatly amused with the extraordinary number of black and gray monkeys, which walked like pigmy armies along the shore, or perched themselves upon the tops of the loftiest trees, like crows. The glowworms, he observes, afforded another curious spectacle; for, setting upon trees, like a fiery cloud, the whole swarm would spread themselves over its branches, sometimes hiding their light all at once, and a moment after shining forth again with the utmost regularity and exactness, as if they were in a perpetual systole and diastole. The innumerable swarms of mosquitoes which inhabited the same banks were
