File:Pompeii; its history, buildings and antiquities - an account of the destruction of the city, with a full description of the remains, and of the recent excavations and also an itinerary for visitors (14586457268).jpg

Identifier: pompeiiitshist00dyer (find matches)
Title: Pompeii; its history, buildings and antiquities : an account of the destruction of the city, with a full description of the remains, and of the recent excavations and also an itinerary for visitors
Year: 1887 (1880s)
Authors: Dyer, Thomas Henry, 1804-1888
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Bell
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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at Pompeii. Thebeautiful statuette of Silenus, already described, was found inthis house. Here also was made the rare discovery of theskeletons of two horses, with the remains of a biga. This description might be extended, but it would be tediousto repeat details of smaller and less interesting houses, thefeatures of which present in general much uniformity ; andwe shall therefore conclude this account of the more recentdiscoveries with a notice of a group of bodies found in thisneighbourhood, the forms of which have been preserved to usthrough the ingenuity of Signer Fiorelli. It has been already remarked that the showers of lapillo,or pumice-stone, by which Pompeii was overwhelmed andburied, were followed by streams of a thick, tenacious mud,which flowing over the deposit of lapillo, and filling up allthe crannies and interstices into which that substance had notbeen able to penetrate, completed the destruction of the city.The objects over which this mud flowed were enveloped in it
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PLASTER CASTS. 477 as in a plaster mould; and where these objects happened tobe human bodies, their decay left a cavity in which theirforms were as accurately preserved and rend^^red as in themould prepared for the casting of a bronze statue. Suchcavities had often been observed. In some of them remnantsof charred wood, accompanied with bronze or other ornaments,showed that the object inclosed had been a piece of furniture :while in others, the remains of bones and of articles of apparelevinced but too plainly that the hollow had been the livinggrave which had swallowed up some unfortunate humanbeing. In a happy moment the idea occurred to SignorFiorelli of filling up these cavities with liquid plaster, andthus obtaining a cast of the objects which had been inclosedin them. The experiment was first made in a small streetleading from the Via del Balcone Pensile towards the Forum.The bodies here found were on the la-pillo at a height of aboutfifteen feet from the level of the ground. Th

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