THE MUSEUM OF NAPLES. 391 
and by the entrance to those catacombs where the early Christians held their 
secret worship. 
So too, we should have the interior of the dwellings of the emperor, the 
nobleman, the rich citizen, and the plebe. How many of those good Romans 
would our modern enthusiast of science be willing to know were smothered eighteen 
centuries since, in order that he might see imperial Rome in the grandeur of the 
first century. The countenance of that enthusiastic member of our Society who 
digs unweariedly in the mounds along the Missouri — methinks I see it light up 
with a sort of scientific joy as he discovers the crumbling bones of a possible pre- 
historic man, lying amidst his wretched arrowheads and potsherds. What, then ! 
Could he find the skeleton of Augustus, mayhap under the shadow of the unstrip- 
ped Pantheon, lying on his golden chariot, the skeletons of whose horses there 
lying, with gilded hoofs and brazen trappings. Around him would be found all 
that Greece had gathered from the world and Rome had brought from Greece. 
This may never be. Five hundred years of war, and five hundred of robbery, 
left Rome what it is still — a dismal Italian city, with ruins so utterly ruined as to 
barely suggest to the imagination what the ancient city might have been ; the 
works of Praxiteles turned to lime. 
Let us turn, then, to the Museum of Naples and learn what the volcanic 
scoriae of A. D. 79 did for the nineteenth century. I find I cannot write of this col- 
lection without trying in a measure to reproduce the atmosphere of the place. I 
believe environment is recognized as an influential element in all scientific mat- 
ters. We will suppose that you have come out of your hotel on the Chiaja on a 
warm January morning; that you invested five cents in rose buds and orange 
blossoms with the black- eyed flower-girl in the vestibule, and that you stand on 
the steps a moment to look out on the famous bay, now curling with blue (they 
are very blue) waves. You see a dozen orange-colored sails of fishing boats— a 
steamer just starting for Alexandria — and a three-master coming in from the 
Golden Horn. Just at that point you find five yelling, whip-cracking cabmen 
roaring at you from the gutter, a coral-girl hanging her strands on one arm and a 
beggar with a colossal sore at the other. You will take refuge in a cabriolet and 
drive o!f up the long ascending slope of the Toledo, teeming with humanity as no 
other street. Arriving at the Capo di Monte, half a thousand feet above the 
shore, the whole of the magnificent bay of Naples lies before you. There is no 
other such view, I believe, on this earth. 
Vesuvius you will necessarily notice first, for the volcano is close at hand, 
and its fire-stained black plume is floating just over you — its vineyards and olive 
orchards extending right up to the line of black lava of 187 1. You cannot see 
Pompeii for it is opposite the mountain, but the site of Herculaneum is marked 
by the town of Portici, built upon the sixty foot bed of lava that still holds the 
greater part of its treasures. Around the entire bay sweeps a line of mountains, 
with the white towns clinging to their sides. Castlemmare, over buried Stabise 
and Sorrento. In the dim distance are the islands of Capri and Ischia. It is, how- 
ever, the western shore of the bay that appeals most warmly to the classical 
