Litmus

“ The superficial strata on which Rome is built are of three main kinds: (1) the plains and valleys on the left bank of the Tiber are covered, as it were, by a sea of alluvial deposits, in the midst of which (2) the hills of volcanic origin rise like so many islands; and (3) on the right bank of the Tiber, around the Janiculan and Vatican Hills, are extensive remains of an ancient sea-beach, conspicuous in parts by its fine golden sand and its deposits of greyish white potter’s clay. ”

“ There are also other quarters of the Mediterranean, as off the coast of Campania, or near the base of Etna, in Sicily, or in the Grecian Archipelago, where another class of rocks is now forming; where showers of volcanic ashes occasionally fall into the sea, and streams of lava overflow its bottom; and where, in the intervals between volcanic eruptions, beds of sand and clay are frequently derived from the waste of cliffs, or the turbid waters of rivers. ”

“ The walls of Pompeii are built above the fields of the Dead, and the rivers of the sleepless Hell. Be warned and fly!'
'Witch, I thank thee for thy care of one not ungrateful. On yon table stands a cup of gold; take it, it is thine. I dreamt not that there lived one, out of the priesthood of Isis, who would have saved Arbaces from destruction. The signs thou hast seen in the bed of the extinct volcano,' continued the Egyptian, musingly, 'surely tell of some coming danger to the city; perhaps another earthquake—fiercer than the last. ”

“ Let us worship the providence of the gods!' He assisted Apaecides to rise, and then turned upward the face of Arbaces; it seemed locked as in death; blood gushed from the Egyptian's lips over his glittering robes; he fell heavily from the arms of Glaucus, and the red stream trickled slowly along the marble. Again the earth shook beneath their feet; they were forced to cling to each other; the convulsion ceased as suddenly as it came; they tarried no longer; Glaucus bore Ione lightly in his arms, and they fled from the unhallowed spot. ”

“ The Greeks inveighed against the sea, cursed the waves, and wondered exceedingly how they had been able to transport such an iniquity and why the yawning deep had not swallowed up the ship. "Was it not unpardonable," they said, " to have called the universal emperor of the Romans, the august, great, only Nicephorus: ' of the Greeks ';—a barbarian, a pauper: 'of the Romans '? Oh sky! Oh earth! Oh sea!" "But what," they said, " shall we do to those scoundrels, those criminals? They are paupers, and if we kill them we pollute our hands with vile blood ”

“ Zosimus tells us that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva, with her formidable ægis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles, and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile gods of Greece. Yet, nevertheless, Alaric a second time mastered the city by means of his barbarian troops. It is wonderful that any remains of the Athens of its prime exist. As it is, it requires a good deal of enthusiasm to ‘do’ its ruins, with which photography has long made the world familiar. ”

“ By that mysterious law of Nature, which humbles one to exalt the other, ye have thriven upon their ruins; thou, haughty Rome, hast usurped the glories of Sesostris and Semiramis—thou art a robber, clothing thyself with their spoils! And these—slaves in thy triumph—that I (the last son of forgotten monarchs) survey below, reservoirs of thine all-pervading power and luxury, I curse as I behold! The time shall come when Egypt shall be avenged! when the barbarian's steed shall make his manger in the Golden House of Nero! ”

“ And the profound mysteries of the Nile were degraded by a hundred meretricious and frivolous admixtures from the creeds of Cephisus and of Tibur. The temple of Isis in Pompeii was served by Roman and Greek priests, ignorant alike of the language and the customs of her ancient votaries; and the descendant of the dread Egyptian kings, beneath the appearance of reverential awe, secretly laughed to scorn the puny mummeries which imitated the solemn and typical worship of his burning clime. ”

“ Save but Glaucus, and I will renounce him. O mighty Arbaces! thou art powerful in evil or in good: save the Athenian, and the poor Ione will never see him more.' As she spoke, she rose with weak and trembling limbs, and falling at his feet, she clasped his knees: 'Oh! if thou really lovest me—if thou art human—remember my father's ashes, remember my childhood, think of all the hours we passed happily together, and save my Glaucus!'
Strange convulsions shook the frame of the Egyptian ”

“ The pebbles and fragments of older rocks which constitute the conglomerate are cemented together by a red or yellow base of dolomite, and in some places the encrinites and other fossils derived from the Mountain Limestone are so detached from the parent rocks that they have the deceptive appearance of belonging to a fauna contemporaneous with the dolomitic beds in which they occur. The imbedded fragments are both rounded and angular, some consisting of sandstone from the coal-measures, being of vast size, and weighing nearly a ton. ”

“ Here we are admitted into the very workshop of Nature, and are privileged to witness her processes of creation. In the neighbourhood of Rome the volcanoes are long extinct. Nature is dead, and there is nothing left but her cold gray ashes. But here we see her in all her vigour, changing and renewing and mingling the ruins of her works in strange association with those of man—the ashes of her volcanoes with the fragments of temples and baths and the houses of Roman senators and poets. ”

“ Visit me, then, Sallust; bring with you the learned scrolls of Epicurus, Pythagoras, Diogenes; arm yourself for defeat; and let us, amidst the groves of Academus, dispute, under a surer guide than any granted to our fathers, on the mighty problem of the true ends of life and the nature of the soul.
'Ione—at that name my heart yet beats!—Ione is by my side as I write: I lift my eyes, and meet her smile. The sunlight quivers over Hymettus: and along my garden I hear the hum of the summer bees. Am I happy, ask you? Oh, what can Rome give me equal to what I possess at Athens? ”

“ Had it been declared that we are living in the Eocene epoch, the idea would not be so extravagant, for the great reptiles of the Upper Chalk, the Mosasaurus, Pliosaurus, and Pterodactyle, and many others, as well as so many genera of chambered univalves, had already disappeared from the earth, and the marine fauna had made a greater approach to our own by nearly the entire difference which separates it from the fauna of the Cretaceous seas. The Eocene nummulitic limestone of Egypt is a rock mainly composed, like the more ancient white chalk, of globigerine mud ”

“ In many instances the organic remains which compose limestone are so large as to be readily visible to the naked eye, and the rock is at once seen to be nothing more than an agglomeration of the skeletons, generally fragmentary, of certain marine animals, cemented together by a matrix of carbonate of lime. Page 24 This is the case, for example, with the so-called "Crinoidal Limestones" and "Encrinital Marbles" with which the geologist is so familiar, especially as occurring in great beds amongst the older formations of the earth's crust. ”

“ As the beautiful marble, which forms the cliffs and coasts of Greece, notwithstanding its homogeneous transformation, betrays by veins, by fossils, and other indications, its sedimentary origin, so Hellenism, although it may appear homogeneous, and cast—so to speak—in one single jet, betrays, nevertheless, its secondary origin, and the sediment which constitutes its material groundwork. ”

“ THE Roman Lituus, the antique straight instrument with the curved end, is drawn from a reproduction in bronze of the original, found in the tomb of a warrior discovered in 1827, at Cervetri, the Etruscan Caere, and preserved in the Museum of the Vatican. The lituus took its name from the augur's staff, which it resembled in shape; it belonged to the cavalry of the Roman Empire. It produces the following proper notes or natural harmonics—
the seventh being flatter than the note which occurs in our modern musical scale. ”

“ The second answer seemed less severe than the first: "Minerva is unable to appease the Olympian Jupiter. Again, therefore, I speak, and my words are as adamant. All else within the bounds of Cecropia and the bosom of the divine Cithaeron shall fall and fail you. The wooden wall alone Jupiter grants to Pallas, a refuge to your children and yourselves. Wait not for horse and foot—tarry not the march of the mighty army—retreat, even though they close upon you. Oh Salamis the divine, thou shalt lose the sons of women, whether Ceres scatter or hoard her harvest!" ”

“ The lentoid gems with their rude intaglios, found in the islands, on the site of Heræum, in the tombs of Mykenæ and elsewhere, belong to the same age, and point back to the loamy plain of Babylonia where stone was rare and precious, and whence, consequently, the art of gem-cutting was spread through the ancient world. We can thus understand the existence of artistic designs and other evidences of civilizing influence among a people who were not yet acquainted with the use of iron. The early Chaldean empire, in spite of the culture to which it had attained, was still in the bronze age ”

“ The predominance of magnetic iron ore, to which they owe their vivid colour, has thus seriously affected the molecular arrangement of the rocks. It is probable that rosso antico, like the Italian red marbles, belongs to one or other of the Liassic formations, which, in Italy as well as in Greece and Asia Minor, constitutes a well-marked geological horizon by its regular stratification and its characteristic ammonite fossils. The quantity found among the Roman ruins of this marble is very large; many of the shops in Rome carving their models of classical buildings in this material. ”

“ Over the ferry you find limestone, which contains all sorts of rubble, hornstone, lava, and calx; and then hardened volcanic ashes, covered over with calcareous tufa. The hills of mixed gravel continue till you come near to Catania, at and beyond which place you find the lava flux, from Ætna. You leave on the left what looks like a crater. (Just under Molimenti the peasants were pulling up the flax.) Nature loves a motly garb; and here you may see how she contrives gaily to deck out the dark bluish-gray lava of the mountains. ”

“ The reputed tomb of Theseus, which was rifled by Cimon the Athenian the year after the destruction of Mycenæ, must have lain nearer the surface, but the bronze spear and sword which were found in it, and which were brought with the bones in triumph from Scyros to Athens, point to its having belonged to much the same period. The spear of Achilles in the temple of Minerva at Phaselis, and the sword of Memnon in the temple of Æsculapius at Miomedia, were also of bronze, of which metal, as Pausanias observes, all the weapons of the heroic age were made. ”

“ A more ancient people still, the Phœnicians, Tyrians, Tyrrhenians, Etruscans, or Carthagenians, who were all colonies from one race of men, long before the foundation of Rome, understood and taught others the working in metals, one instance of which is remarkable: Hiram, king of Tyre, cast the brazen sea, and other immense objects in metal, for Solomon’s temple. Let us cast our{10} eyes on Argos, Athens, Corinth, and Sicyon, those ancient abodes of good taste and transcendent genius ”

“ For, as a general rule, the more ancient the strata is in which the limestone is found, the harder the limestone is; except in cases where volcanic action and earthquake pressure have hardened limestone in more recent strata, as in the case of the white marbles of Carrara in Italy, which are of the age of our Oolites, that is, of the freestone of Bath, etc., hardened by the heat of intruded volcanic rocks. ”

“ There canst thou pretend only to shape thy course—there, ill or dying, I will meet thee by the statue of Silenus, in the copse that skirts the garden; and I myself will guide thee to the witch. Let us wait till, with the evening star, the goats of the herdsmen are gone to rest; when the dark twilight conceals us, and none shall cross our steps. Go home and fear not. By Hades, swears Arbaces, the sorcerer of Egypt, that Ione shall never wed with Glaucus.'
'And that Glaucus shall be mine,' added Julia, filling up the incompleted sentence. ”

“ Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest things in the world in their relation to human history,—erections, many of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of Herodotus,—are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the Palæozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. ”

“ The spurs of Mount Olympus leave only a width of a mile between the mountain and the sea. Half this space is filled by the broad marshes at the mouth of the Baphyrus, the rest of the ground is taken up either by the temple of Jupiter or the town itself. The little bit that is left could be blocked by a small fosse and rampart, and there was such a quantity of stones and growing timber at hand that a wall might have been thrown up and turrets raised. ”