42 



These floors and the walls having 1 been cleared out, exposed the 

 outline of four rooms, besides passages with broken bits of work 

 showing a somewhat extensive range of buildings which, though 

 confessedly plain, were not without some interesting points of detail. 



In two of the passages were rude pavements made of slabs of 

 various sizes, of the same kind of stone as those of the smaller liassic 

 tesserae. They are fitted together as neatly as may be, considering 

 they are not squared. We notice these as being the first of the kind 

 we have met with. The truth seems to be that this ingenious people 

 seem to have used the materials which came nearest to hand in the 

 best possible fashion. 



ROMAN ROOF TILES. 



Upon digging down to the floors the first objects that struck 

 one's attention, besides occasional portions of carved stones, giving 

 a notion of artistic taste, were the roof tiles. These, which were 

 composed of fissile slabs of the lias limestones the same as the bits 

 of paving stones, seem to have been first split into slabs of about an 

 inch thick ; they were 16 in. long and 10 in. wide, and fashioned in 

 a highly ingenious manner, which will be best made out from the 

 following diagrams. 



If quadrangular tiles had been used, as with ourselves, the arrange- 

 ment of them would have been as follows : 



FIG. A. ROOFIXG WITH COMMON SLABS. 



Here the tiles wrap over each other, and so prevent the wet get- 

 ting into the roof j but it is obvious that when each tile weighs as 



