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
paintings, now transferred to the museum at Nap