HOW WAS HERCULANEUM DESTROYED? 233 



Pompeii in the year 63, under Nero, did ITerculaneum no injury ; so 

 that there a part of the buildings anterior to the empire, and houses 

 of earlier style, which implies purer taste, must have been preserved. 

 This conclusion is strengthened at the present day by the beauty of 

 those objects collected at Herculaneum, and will be settled beyond 

 question whenever the city itself shall be restored to light. 



What was the fate of Herculaneum during the eruption of A. d. 

 79 ? What special phenomena were displayed on that side of Vesu- 

 vius ? What causes buried a nourishing city in an instant out of sight 

 of the inhabited world ? It has been proved that Pompeii suffered an 

 interment so incomplete that after a few days its inhabitants could 

 recognize their dwellings, could encamp above and clear them out ; 

 Herculaneum, on the contrary, was buried so deep that the next day 

 it was impossible to trace a vestige of it. The ready answer to all 

 these questions usually is : " Lava worked all the ruin. Herculaneum 

 was swallowed up under eighty feet of lava. If works of art, bronzes 

 and pictures have been miraculously preserved, it was due to the im- 

 penetrable shield of lava, yielding only to a cutting tool, that pro- 

 tected them from the ravages of time." The explanation is tempt- 

 ing. Fancy pictures waves of fire rolling upon the city, rising like 

 the tidal swell, surging in through doors and windows, sweeping around 

 and moulding every thing, then slowly cooling, and preserving for 

 posterity treasures that labor must unveil, repaid by their recovery 

 in unharmed beauty. 



This is really the opinion that all Europe holds, and even at Na- 

 ples almost all visitors of Herculaneum declare that they hav' 5 '-" ^ed 

 the lava with their own hands ; and, in books written on the^^M^vian 

 cities, more than one traveller affirms as positively that the difficulty 

 of cutting the lava presents the chief obstacle to the disinterment of 

 Herculaneum. How can one venture to meet such convictions by as- 

 serting that watei-, not fire, overwhelmed Herculaneum ; that it was 

 not a torrent of glowing lava, but a flood of mud and wet ashes that 

 filled the city ? How uproot a prepossession so deep that the works of 

 geologists and savants have failed to shake it ? Dufrenoy proved that 

 water alone swept over Herculaneum heaps of scoria and pumice 

 crumbled from La Somma ; Dyer, Overbeck, Ernst Breton, and others, 

 have affirmed in various languages, to no purpose, that nothing but 

 ashes, wet to paste and hardened by pressure, covered over Hercu- 

 laneum : no one heeded them, and the blame continues to be thrown 

 on the lava, which makes excavation so costly and laborious. 



But every one knows the nature and effects of lava. Lava is an in- 

 candescent mass, of so high temperature as to absorb and melt all fu- 

 sible bodies ; forced out from the fissures of the crater by irresistible 

 expansive power, this mass rolls on in a fiery river, burning up every 

 thing in its path ; cooling slowly, it grows as hard as porphyry or ada- 

 mant. Now, I appeal to the recollection of all who have ascended 



