in the course of so many ages through the open _luminaria_; others had been the scene of wilful injury done by Goth or Lombard, or by neighbours nearer home seeking forbidden treasures, or only anxious to make use of caves and cellars which they found ready-made to their hands. In some places the roofs of the galleries and chambers had given way under the shock of earthquakes, or from the continual disturbance of the surface of the ground for the purposes of building or agriculture. In a word, the work of exploration was attended with very real danger, so that no Christian archæologist can ever speak of Antonio Bosio—the Columbus, as he is often and deservedly called, of this new world of subterranean Rome—without admiration and enthusiasm. He was preparing to communicate to the world the fruits of all his toil, when he was cut off by death at the early age of fifty-four. His work, however, was published by others some five or six years later, in 1635. It was presently translated into German and Latin; an abridgment of it also was published in Holland, and at once the Catacombs resumed their ancient place as one of the wonderful sights of Rome which all intelligent travellers should visit. More visitors, however, were attracted by religious than by scientific motives, for Bosio’s book had been the means of recalling some to the Catholic faith; and it was obvious that a voice, issuing as it were from the graves of some of the very earliest professors of Christianity, had a right to claim a hearing amid the din of religious strife which was then raging. Moreover, the devotion of the faithful had been excited by the hope of finding the bodies of saints and martyrs still lying in their graves; and concessions were therefore made to certain religious communities, and even to pious individuals, to search for them. In this way excavations were going on in a number of places at once, quite independently of one another, and no trustworthy record was kept of any. At last, in 1688, all private concessions were finally revoked, and henceforward the matter was reserved entirely to official hands. Even so, however, the scientific history of the Catacombs scarcely fared better than before. The literature which appeared on the subject, with hardly an exception, was controversial or apologetic rather than archæological. Nobody followed the historical and topographical system of Bosio; so that from his death down to the year 1740 we have no chronicles of each new discovery as it was made, but only a number of independent treatises, on single epitaphs perhaps, or on some special class of ancient monuments, out of which a diligent reader may laboriously extract for himself some very imperfect account of the results of the excavations that were in progress. Then there followed another hundred years, during the greater part of which the Catacombs remained almost in the same obscurity in which they had been buried for so many ages before Bosio was born.