Internally Pompeii presented, like many another Roman town, marks of its six hundred years of existence. There was at least one perfect Doric temple; there were Oscan-Grecian buildings, notably the so-called “House of the Surgeon,” with its air of old-fashioned simplicity; there were houses of the Republican period; there were numberless dwellings of the Imperial era; there were unfinished structures that were being completed at the time of the city’s overthrow. For, sixteen years before Vesuvius suddenly awoke from its long sleep, the neighbourhood had been visited by the severe earthquake shock of 63, and the effects produced by this disaster had not nearly been effaced, when the great event of 79 transformed the town into a huge museum for the delight and instruction of future generations. Pompeii therefore preserves the marks of more than half a thousand years of civilization, so that those who will take the necessary trouble can trace within its area the gradual progress of its social and political life from the far-off days of Greeks and Oscans to the reign of the Emperor Titus. The case of a ruined Exeter or Shrewsbury could not be widely different. The students of ensuing ages would be able to find in the dead town one or two churches of Norman or Plantagenet times; portions of medieval city walls and gateways, perhaps even some undoubted traces of Roman baths or fortifications; some few public buildings erected under Tudor or Stuart sovereigns; a large number of the plain roomy mansions of the Georgian period; and, last of all, a preponderating quantity of nineteenth century structures of every description—churches, warehouses, factories, inns, barracks, shops, dwelling-houses. Many would be the inscriptions and monuments we should find in such a town, alluding to private and public persons utterly unknown to English history, but more or less noteworthy in local annals: grandees of civic life, soldiers, philanthropists, clergymen, _et hoc genus omne_. Future generations of scholars would doubtless strive eagerly to obtain details of the careers of these provincial worthies, who filled municipal offices in the reigns of Queen Victoria and King Edward, in order to throw more light upon the period wherein they flourished. Let us apply then the same principles to the study of Pompeii _mutatis mutandis_, for in our quest of better knowledge of the old Roman life we fix anxiously upon every detail concerning the leading personages of the dead city. Nevertheless, it is its existence in the aggregate that proves of surpassing interest to us; we desire to learn of the daily tasks and occupations of the mass of its population, rather than to become acquainted with the private histories of its leading individuals; we study the former, in fact, only as a means to a definite end. We cry for information, which to a certain extent we can secure, as to how an average Roman city was administered, provisioned, drained; how its inhabitants