Mr. F. C. Cooper, an artist who was sent out by the trustees of the British Museum to assist Mr. Layard in making sketches of the ruins at Nineveh, states that on the banks of the Tigris there are plantations of melons, which the natives are obliged to watch, particularly in the night season, as herds of wild boars come clown from the mountains to slake their thirst at the river, and that they would utterly waste these, did not their owners alarm them by their cries.