39 
POMPEII 
(Illustrated by the Lantern). 
Mr. HENRY CROWTHER, F.R.M.S. March 10/A, 1908. 
Mr. W. Lancaster, Vice-President, in the chair. 
The Lecturer, after some remarks on the fascinating effect 
of Vesuvius, and on Naples, with its crooked streets as 
“ gestureland,” piloted the audience over the excavated ruins 
of the buried city where he was fortunate in having as his 
guide a scientific man. In the museum at Pompeii they 
were in touch with real humanity. The rooms were weird, 
but one of the most weird was at Palermo where they saw 
persons in the coffins. At some of the figures in Pompeii 
they were looking back 2,000 years. The eruption took 
place in 79 A.D., not in August but November. The roofs 
of the houses were soon covered with lava. Most of the 
people escaped, but a large number were buried and in many 
cases their corpses had left perfect moulds in the ashes which 
enveloped them. They saw the body of one woman trying 
to filter the gas from the air by the use of her night-dress ; 
the body of a man who had evidently turned back to the 
house for his money carried in a belt around him ; others 
had their hands over their mouths trying to filter air through 
the sulphurous gases — the manner in which many miners 
overtaken in a pit accident to-day were found to have died. 
A chained dog, whose owner had forgotten to release it, was 
suffocated in the contortions of torture. A series of lamps 
were also found, the designs of which revealed the character 
of the owner. In that case they could tell a man, not by his 
books, but by his lamps. Only about one third of the city 
has yet been explored and what would yet still be found they 
did not know ; but what had been explored seemed nothing 
to the whole. They have unearthed the Forum — “ the 
talking shop,” the buildings which surround it, the temple 
of Jupiter, the Basilica or Town Hall, the Temple of Apollo, 
the Marcellum or provision market, the shrine of the city 
lares, the Temple of Vespasian, the Temple of Fortuna Augusta, 
