If it be a fact that the Greeks and Romans knew this process, one would naturally expect to find at least some fragments of casts or moulds in plaster of their great works,—as for instance of their small and exquisite Corinthian bronzes, if not of their large figures. But, so far as we are aware, nothing of the kind has ever been found. The whole city of Pompeii in the height of its luxury was buried under a fall of ashes, which for many long centuries preserved the most refined, fragile, and delicate utensils and works of art; and it is but a few years since that we removed these ashes and explored its houses and rooms which had been untouched since that fatal calamity befell them of which Pliny gives us so vivid an account. It is on the statements of the younger Pliny himself that those rely who claim that the ancients knew and practiced casting in plaster. Long before his day, then, this art had been invented; and we should naturally expect to find some specimens of it in this city of luxury, among its pictures, its vases, its statues, and its glass. But in all Pompeii there has not been found a vestige of a casting in plaster. Its stuccoes still remain, the bas-reliefs worked in plaster on its walls are still uninjured, its paintings are still fresh, its vases unbroken, its household utensils perfect. Hermetically sealed up under that mound of ashes, there was nothing to injure a cast in any house, if it existed. But there is absolutely nothing of the kind. Yet this was a people devoted to art, and whose houses were filled with knick-knacks of every kind. We find the sculptor’s studio, but there is not a cast in it, nor is there the shop of a caster. It is plain, therefore, that there was not a cast in Pompeii. But if anywhere there were casts from the round there were also piece-moulds from the round. Where are they? Has any person ever heard of one? Now a hollow cast is comparatively a fragile object; but a plaster mould, saturated as it must be with oil, is anything but a fragile object. Sheltered from the inclemencies of storm and rain, it would last for thousands of years, and would even resist a century of exposure to the weather of Italy. But not underground nor aboveground anywhere has such a thing been found. Whatever moulds have been found are fit only for mere stamping. They are extremely rude, without under-cuttings, and seem merely to give a general shape. They are not cast upon anything, but worked out by hand, and are not in plaster. They are all small; nothing ever has been found which is either a mould, or a cast from life, or from a statue, or from a vase or bowl, or any careful work of art.