THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8259, 12 October 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1906.

The very interesting discoveries of excavations in Egypt leads the Spectator to remind the public that "there exists in all its completeness an ancient city, well-nigh untouched by the excavutor, and waiting only for the spade and the necessary millionaire." Th is city is Heroulaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and believed by most people to have been as carefully and completely excavated as its neighbour, Pompeii. This, however, is not so. Two or more villages now stand, on the hardened 70 feet of mud above the town, and great obstacle to excavation. Some slight amount of excavation was done in the 18th century, but since then, while explorers have been busily successful in buried cities in other lands, and at Pompeii, little or nothing has been added to our knowledge of Herculaneum. Yet what little is knowu of the town suggests, and all but proves, that the articles hidden below the mud are of a far more valuable character than those found in Pompeii. While on Pompeii fell a shower] of hot ashes, which burnt up anything

so inflammable as parabment or papyrus, Herculaneum was smothered by waves of mud. While Pompeii has not yielded a single manuscript, the ooly house in Herculaneum thoroughly explored oontained nuceroua rolls of papyri—works by philosophers of the Epiourean school, Ihero is, therefore, excellent reason to believe that the buried city is full of manuscripts, and what these may contain is tantalising to think on. There may be almost the whole literuture of antiquity beneath this mad. There may be there the lyrio poets of Greece, whose loss makes, perhaps, the worst gap in all anoienf. literature, the lost writers of tragedy, such hs Phryniohus, whose songs the veterans of Marathon hummed as they went through the streets at nigbt, loßt historians who wrote of Alexander and his successes, and the missing books of Sallust and Livy. Herculaneum was inhabited, there is reason to believe, by a mere cultivated class than the pleasure-seekers of Pompeii, whose one anxiety was that "gladiators might be many BDd sport good." Anything,, indeed, is possible iu Herculaneum excavation, for this corner of the earth has been securely embalmed by its cafcas trophe, and the drums and tramplings have passed over and left no trace. Money ia the one thing wanting to test these speculations, and unfold the greatest romance of excavation and disooverj. The sum neoded to compensate the villagers and to excavate might be £250,000, perhaps more, but to some millionaires this is not a very great sum, and if four rr five combined the share of each would hardly be felt.