238 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shattered by the eai'thquake, and pouring their contents into the valley. 

 By degrees, as the mud settled in the streets, the courts, rooms, and 

 dwellings, the level of the water rose, new deposits gathered ; the ashes 

 falling in dense masses from the sky, grew saturated, and increased 

 the rising heaps. Thus, in a few days, perhaps a few hours, a flourish- 

 ing city was swallowed up, under an average thickness of sixty feet of 

 mud. Those of the inhabitants who did not take flight at once, were 

 drowned. In vain they climbed to the upper stories, then to the ter- 

 races and roofs they perished at last, leaving the impressions of their 

 bodies in the fluid ashes. 



When the waters had drained away, nothing was to be seen but a 

 grayish hillock, seamed on the surface by the streamlets which had 

 been the last to dry up. Nothing rose above the surface, neither tem- 

 ple-fagades, nor theatre-walls, nor tops of the loftiest buildings. Un- 

 der a shell which would harden and thicken every day, Herculaneum 

 was buried far otherwise than Pompeii had been. It was not fifteen 

 feet of pumice stones that filled the ground floors and first stories 

 of the houses up to the windows ; it was 70 or 80 feet of compact 

 matter that hid even the site of the city. The inhabitants who es- 

 caped must afterward have returned, as the Pompeians did ; but, less 

 fortunate, they could not revisit their homes, buried beneath their 

 reach in unknown depths, without a trace to indicate them. Signs of 

 excavation are thought to have been detected outside the city, above 

 the rich villa in which the moderns have recovered 1,756 rolls of pa- 

 pyrus, but the owners did not dig deep enough, and their attempt 

 was fruitless, as is proved by the art treasures discovered a century 

 ago, which they would not have failed to carry away. It is likely that 

 the chief impediment to digging, next to the depth, was the moisture 

 of an alluvial deposit, in which any work soon became impossible. 



But after sixteen centuries the moisture had evaporated, and the 

 muddy lava at this day is compact and resistant enough to permit ex- 

 cavations in all directions throughout it. The surface has been re- 

 stored to cultivation and covered with houses ; Portici and Resina are 

 populous and flourishing towns. New eruptions wrapped Hercula- 

 neum in a thicker pall, and it seemed forever blotted out from the 

 world, until, in 1684, a baker, in digging a well, came upon ancient 

 ruins those of the theatre and brought the buried city again to light. 



-*- 



SKETCH OF GENERAL SIR EDWARD SABINE. 



WE furnish our readers this month with an excellent likeness 

 of the venerable President of the Royal Society, England, 

 who will have a permanent and distinguished place in the history 

 of science through his researches on terrestrial magnetism, of which 

 he may be regarded as the pioneer explorer. He is of Irish ex- 



