foiuid in the ruins of Herculaneum, 195 
January, 1819, it did not appear to me, that more than from 
80 to 120 offered proper subjects for experiments ; and this 
estimate, as my researches proceeded, appeared much too 
high. These MSS. had been objects of interest for nearly 
70 years ; the best had long ago been operated upon, and 
those remaining had not only undergone injuries from time, 
but likewise from other causes, such as transport, rude ex- 
amination, and mutilations for the purpose of determining if 
they contained characters. 
The appearances of different rolls were extremely various. 
They were of all shades of colours from a light chesnut 
brown to a deep black ; some externally were of a glossy 
black, like jet, which the superintendants called “ varnished 
several contained the umbilicus or rolling stick in the middle 
converted into dense charcoal. I saw two or three specimens of 
papyri which had the remains of characters on both sides, but 
in general one side only was written upon. In their texture 
they were as various as in their colours ; the pale brown ones 
in general presented only a kind of skeleton of a leaf, in which 
the earthy matter was nearly in as large a proportion as the 
vegetable matter, and they were light, and the layers easily se- 
parated from each other. A number of darker browm ones 
which, from a few characters discovered in opening them, ap- 
peared to be Latin MSS., were agglutinated as it were into one 
mass ; and when they were opened by introducing a needle be- 
tween the layers, spots or lines of charcoal appeared where the 
folds had been, as if the letters had been washed out by water, 
and the matter of which they were composed deposited oft 
the folds. Amongst the black MSS. a very few fragments 
mdcccxxi. C c 
