of Edinburgh, Session 1881 - 82 . 
423 
eruption was the agent of destruction, have been fully answered hy- 
men of science ; and the real nature of the catastrophe has been 
impressed upon the public imagination through the popular work of 
fiction by the late Lord Lytton, entitled The Last Days of Pompeii. 
But I am concerned to-night with the written evidence alone. 
That evidence, happily for my audience, is not overwhelming in bulk. 
Nor is it conflicting in its character. Further, it has not been thus 
far entangled with prepossessions arising out of any such controversy, 
religious, political, or even literary or scientific, as sometimes evokes 
the passions and obscures the judgment. 
Is there, then, it may be asked, any difficulty in fairly weighing 
this evidence? I answer, “Yes; there is a difficulty, — a difficulty 
very real and very considerable ; and one that assuredly is in nowise 
diminished by the circumstance that it is for the most part 
unacknowledged and unfelt.” Herein it lies, that students of the 
records still extant approach them with an unconscious bias. While 
the eye wanders over the page, the mind’s eye is busily employed 
elsewhere. It recalls the unearthed tombs and pillars of Pompeii, 
or the torch-lit recesses of Herculaneum, as known to it through 
actual vision or else by picture and photograph. The dry light, on 
which Bacon lays such stress, is tinted by coloured glasses ; and 
numbers, I am convinced, read information into these documents, 
and afterwards persuade themselves and others that they obtained it 
out of the documents. They arrive, indeed, at conclusions which in 
the main are just ; but they are mistaken as regards the ground 
of their inferences. I may, of course, be told that such a condition 
of affairs is often inevitable ; that multitudes of men will be found, 
on a vast variety of subjects, to be right in their conclusions, but 
wrong in their apprehension of the means by which they reached 
them. Be it so ; but, however capable of palliation may be such a 
mental condition in the case of the many, it certainly is not one 
which deserves to be cherished among educated men. 
Is there any peril lying in a contrary direction to that which has 
just been indicated? Certainly there is. It is conceivable that a 
student of the evidence in question may have been so much struck 
by the carelessness and unconscious prejudice of ordinary critics as 
to rush into an opposite extreme, and to minimise the importance 
and definiteness of information which it really does afford. This 
