to pull teeth with, as some affirm; to catch and compress arteries, as others declare; there is a specillum of bronze, a probe rounded in the form of an S; there are lancets, pincers, spatulas, hooks, a trident, needles of all kinds, incision knives, cauteries, cupping-glasses—­I don’t know what not—­fully three hundred different articles, at all events.  This rich collection proves that the ancients were quite skilful in surgery and had invented many instruments thought to be modern.  This is all that it is worth our while to know.  For more ample information, examine the volume entitled Memoires de l’Academie d’Herculaneum.

Other shops (that of the color merchant, that of the goldsmith, the sculptor’s atelier, etc.) have revealed to us some of the processes of the ancient artists.  We know, for instance, that those of Pompeii employed mineral substances almost exclusively in the preparation of their colors; among them chalk, ochre, cinnabar, minium, etc.  The vegetable kingdom furnished them nothing but lamp-black, and the animal kingdom their purple.  The colors mixed with rosin have occasioned the belief that encaustic was the process used by the ancients in their mural paintings, an opinion keenly combatted by other hypotheses, themselves no less open to discussion; into this debate it is not our part to enter.  However the case may be, the color dealer’s family was fearfully decimated by the eruption, for fourteen skeletons were found in his shop.

As for the sculptor, he was very busy at the time of the catastrophe; quite a number of statues were found in his place blocked out or unfinished, and with them were instruments of his profession, such as scissors, punchers, files, etc.  All of these are at the museum in Naples.

There were artists, then, in Pompeii, but above all, there were artisans.  The fullers so often mentioned by the inscriptions must have been the most numerous; they formed a respectable corporation.  Their factory has been discovered.  It is a peristyle surrounded with rooms, some of which served for shops and others for dwellings.  A painted inscription on the street side announces that the dyers (offectores) vote for Posthumus Proculus.  These offectores were those who retinted woollen goods.  Those who did the first dyeing were called the infectores.  Infectores qui alienum colorem in lanam conficiunt, offectores qui proprio colori novum officiunt.  In the workshop there were four large basins, one above the other; the water descended from the first to the next one and so on down to the last, there being a fifth sunken in the ground.  Along the four basins ran a platform, at the end of which were ranged six or seven smaller basins, or vats, in which the stuffs were piled up and fulled.  At the other extremity of the court, a small marble reservoir served, probably, as a washing vat for the workmen.  But the most curious objects among the ruins were the