these smoke-grimed passages allow us from time to time to obtain a momentary glimpse of the angle of a house, the colonnade of some temple, the steps of a theatre. Everything is fragmentary, mutilated, dingy, uncertain, confused, and therefore unsatisfactory. Well, at the end of an hour spent in wandering amongst these abysmal recesses, the most hardened archæologist, the most dry-as-dust antiquary, the most inquisitive of tourists begins to experience only one feeling—an intense desire to ascend to the light of day and to breathe once more the fresh air of the upper world.” Nevertheless, it was from these dismal caverns, black as Erebus, that some of the choicest marbles and bronzes that now adorn the Museum at Naples were originally extracted. From a villa at Herculaneum also was taken the famous collection of 3000 rolls of papyrus, chiefly filled with the writings of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, perhaps the greatest “find” of ancient literature that has yet been made, although the contents of this damaged library, deciphered with equal toil and ingenuity, have not proved to be of the value originally set upon them by expectant scholars. But much of the city itself has yet hardly been touched since the days when it was destroyed in the reign of Titus, so that far below the squalid lanes of Portici and Resina there must still exist acres upon acres of undisturbed buildings, public and private, many of them perhaps filled with priceless works of Greek and Roman art, for Herculaneum, unlike Pompeii, was never tampered with by the ancients themselves, for the coating of volcanic mud, which filled the whole area of the city, made impracticable a systematic searching of its ruins by the despoiled citizens. Then, as if nature had not already buried the city sufficiently deep, subsequent eruptions of Vesuvius have superimposed additional layers of lava, whilst confiding human beings have in their turn built habitations upon the volcanic crust.