CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY* 393 



these things enable us to realize the supposition just made respecting: 

 the Romans, and oblige us to say, that all these structures were the 

 work of unknown races of men, on whose history even tradition 

 sheds not a ray of light. 



It is easy to make the case still stronger. When, in 1738, the 

 workmen, in excavating a well, struck upon the theatre of Hercula- 

 neum, which had reposed, for seventeen centuries, beneath the lava 

 of Vesuvius; when, subsequently, (1750,) Pompeii was disencum- 

 bered of its volcanic ashes and cinders, and thus two cities were 

 brought to light; had history been quite silent respecting their ex- 

 istence, as it was respecting their destruction ;* would not all obser- 

 vers say, and have not all actually said, — here are the works of 

 man, his temples, his forums, his amphitheatres, his tombs, his shops 

 of traffic and of arts, his houses, furniture, pictures, and personal or- 

 naments, his streets, with their pavements and wheel-marks, worn in 

 the solid stone, his coins, his grinding mills, his very wine and food, 

 his dungeons, with skeletons of the prisoners chained in their awful 

 solitudes, and here and there a victim, who, although at liberty, was 

 overtaken by the fiery storm. 



Because the soil had formed, and grass and trees had grown, and suc- 

 cessive generations of men had unconsciously walked, toiled, or built 

 their houses, over the entombed cities; and because they were cover- 

 ed by lava or cinders, does any one hesitate to admit, that they were 

 once real cities, that they stood upon what was then the upper sur- 

 face, that their streets once rang with the noise of business, and their 

 halls and theatres with the voice of pleasure; and that, in an evil hour, 

 they were overwhelmed by the eruptions of Vesuvius, and their name 

 and place blotted out from the earth and forgotten. 



All this is legibly read by every observer, and all agree in the con- 

 clusions to be drawn. When moreover, the traveller of the present 

 day sees the cracks in the walls of the houses of Pompeii, and ob- 

 serves that some of them have been thrown out of the perpendicular 

 and have been pointed, and plastered, and shored up with props, he 

 learns, that the fatal convulsion was not the first, and that the doom- 

 ed towns, must have been before shaken on their foundations, by the 

 throes of the laboring earth. 



To establish all this, it is of no decisive importance that scholars 

 have gleaned,'here and there, a fragment from ancient Roman classics,. 



' ♦ In the histories of those times, it is oaly said, in general terms, that cities and 

 villages were overwhelmed. 



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