"I have frequently been present," wrote a half-Pompeian, a year or two ago, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_--"I have frequently been present for hours together, seated on a sand-bank which itself, perhaps, concealed wonders, and witnessed this rude yet interesting toil, from which I could not withdraw my gaze. I therefore have it in my power to write understandingly. I do not relate what I read, but what I saw. Three systems, to my knowledge, have been employed in these excavations. The first, inaugurated under Charles III., was the simplest. It consisted in hollowing out the soil, in extricating the precious objects found, and then in re-filling the orifice--an excellent method of forming a museum by destroying Pompeii. This method was abandoned so soon as it was discovered that a whole city was involved. The second system, which was gradually brought to perfection in the last century, was earnestly pursued under Murat. The work was started in many places at once, and the laborers, advancing one after the other, penetrating and cutting the hill, followed the line of the streets, which they cleared little by little before them. In following the streets on the ground-level, the declivity of ashes and pumice-stone which obstructed them was attacked below, and thence resulted many regrettable accidents. The whole upper part of the houses, commencing with the roofs, fell in among the rubbish, along with a thousand fragile articles, which were broken and lost without there being any means of determining the point from which they had been hurled down. In order to obviate this inconvenience, Signor Fiorelli has started a third system. He does not follow the streets by the ground-level, but he marks them out over the hillocks, and thus traces among the trees and cultivated grounds wide squares indicating the subterranean, islets. No one is ignorant of the fact that these islets--_isole, insulæ_ in the modern as well as in the ancient language of Italy--indicate blocks of buildings. The islet traced, Signor Fiorelli repurchases the land which had been sold by King Ferdinand I. and gives up the trees found upon it.[A] "The ground, then, being bought and the vegetation removed, work begins. The earth at the summit of the hill is taken off and carried away on a railroad, which descends from the middle of Pompeii by a slope that saves all expense of machinery and fuel, to a considerable distance beyond the amphitheatre and the city. In this way, the most serious question of all, to wit, that of clearing away the dirt, is solved. Formerly, the ruins were covered in with it, and subsequently it was heaped up in a huge hillock, but now it helps to construct the very railroad that carries it away, and will, one day, tip it into the sea.