ART OF BAKING. FULLONICA

THE fame of an actor has been justly said to be of all fame the most perishable, because he leaves no memorial of his powers, except in the fading memories of the generation which has beheld him. An analogous proposition might be made with respect to the mechanical arts : of all sorts of knowledge they are the most perishable, because the knowledge of them cannot be transmitted by mere description. Let any great convulsion of nature put an end to their practice for a generation or two, and though the scientific part of them may be preserved in books, the skill in manipulation, acquired by a long series of improvements, is lost. If Britain be destined to relapse into such a state of barbarism as Italy passed through in the period which divides ancient and modern history, its inhabitants a thousand years hence will know little more of the manual processes of printing, dyeing, and the other arts which minister to our daily comfort, in spite of all the books which have been and shall be written, than we know of the manual processes of ancient Italy. We reckon, therefore, among the most interesting discoveries of Pompeii, those which relate to the manner of conducting handicrafts, of which it is not too much to say that we know nothing except through this medium. It is to be regretted, that as far as our information goes, there are but two trades on which any light has yet been thrown, those, shall namely, of the baker and the dyer. We devote this chapter to collecting what is known upon these subjects.

Several bakers' shops have been found, all in a tolerable state of preservation. The mills, the oven, the kneading-troughs, the vessels for containing water, flour, leaven, have all been discovered, and seem to leave nothing wanting to our still knowledge; in some of the vessels the very flour remained, still capable of being identified, though reduced almost to a cinder. But in the centre some lumps of whitish matter resembling chalk remained, which, when wetted and placed on a red-hot iron, gave out the peculiar odour which flour thus treated emits. Even the very bread, in a perfect though carbonized form, has in some instances been found in the oven. One of these bakers' shops was attached to the House of Sallust, another to the House of Pansa : probably they were worth a handsome rent. A third, which we select for description, for one will serve perfectly as a type of the whole, seems to have belonged to a man of higher class, a sort of capitalist; for instead of renting a mere dependency of another man's house, he lived in a tolerably good house of his own, of which the bakery forms a part. It stands next to the House of Sallust, on the south side, being divided from it only by a narrow street. Its front is in the main street or Via Consularis, leading from the Gate of Herculaneum to the Forum. Entering by a small vestibule, the visitor finds himself in a tetrastyle atrium (a thing not common at Pompeii), of ample dimensions considering the character of the house, being about thirty-six feet by thirty. The pillars which supported the ceiling are square and solid, and their size, combined with indications observed in a fragment of the entablature, led Mazois to suppose that, instead of a roof, they had been surmounted by a terrace. The impluvium is marble. At the end of the atrium is what would be called a tablinum in the house of a man of family, through which we enter the bakehouse, which is at the back of the house, and opens into the smaller street, which, diverging from the, main street at the fountain by Pansa's house, runs up straight to the city walls. The atrium is surrounded by different apartments, offering abundant accommodation, but such as we need not stop to describe.

The workroom is about thirty-three feet long by twenty- six. The centre is occupied by four stone mills, exactly like those found in the other two shops, for all the bakers ground their own flour. To give more room they are placed diagonally, so as to form, not a square, but a lozenge. Mazois was present at the excavation of this house, and saw the mills at the moment of their discovery, when the iron-work, though entirely rust-eaten, was yet perfect enough to explain satisfactorily the method of construction. This will be best understood from the following representation, one half of which is an elevation, the other half a section.

The base is a cylindrical stone, about five feet in diameter and two feet high. Upon this, forming part of the same block, or else firmly fixed into it, is a conical projection about two feet high, the sides slightly curving inwards. Upon this there rests another block, externally resembling a dice-box, internally an hour-glass, being shaped into two hollow cones with their vertices towards each other, the lower one fitting the conical surface on which it rests, though not with any degree of accuracy. To diminish friction, however, a strong iron pivot was inserted in the top of the solid cone, and a corresponding socket let into the narrow part of the hour-glass. Four holes were cut through the stone parallel to this pivot. The narrow part was hooped on the outside with iron, into which wooden bars were inserted, by means of which the upper stone was turned upon its pivot, by the labour of men or asses. The upper hollow cone served as a hopper, and was filled with corn, which fell by degrees through the four holes upon the solid cone, and was reduced to powder by friction between the two rough surfaces. Of course it worked its way to the bottom by degrees, and fell out on the cylindrical base, round which a channel was cut to facilitate the collection. These machines are about six feet high in the whole, made of a rough grey volcanic full of large crystals of leucite. Thus rude, in a period of high refinement and luxury, was one of the commonest and most necessary machines thus careless were the Romans of the amount of labour wasted in preparing an article of daily and universal consumption. This, probably, arose in chief from the employment of slaves, the hardness of whose task was little cared for; while the profit and encouragement to enterprise on the part of the professional baker was proportionately diminished, since every family of wealth probably prepared its bread at home.

Section of the Mill.

But the same inattention to the useful arts runs through everything that they did. Their skill in working metals was equal to ours; nothing can be more beautiful than the execution of tripods, lamps, and vases, nothing coarser than their locks; while at the same time the door handles, bolts, &c., which were seen, are often exquisitely wrought. To what cause can this sluggishness be referred? In England we see that a material improvement in any article, though so trifling as a corkscrew or pencil-case, is pretty sure to make the fortune of some man, though unfortunately that man is very often not the inventor. Had the encouragement to industry been the same, the result would have been the same. Articles of luxury were in high request, and of them the supply was first-rate. But the demands of a luxurious nobility would never have repaid any man for devoting his attention to the improvement of mills or perfecting smith's work, and there was little general commerce to set ingenuity at work. Italy imported largely both agricultural produce and manufactures in the shape of tribute from a conquered world, and probably exported part of her peculiar productions; but we are not aware that there is any ground for supposing that she manufactured goods for exportation to any extent.

Originally mills were turned by hand, and this severe labour seems, in all half-savage times, to have been conducted by women. It was so in Egypt; it was so in Greece in the time of Homer, who employs fifty females in the house of Alcinous upon this service. It was so in Palestine in the time of the Evangelists, and in England in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. We find a passage of St. Matthew thus rendered by Wicliffe: "Two wymmen schulen (shall) be grinding in one quern," or hand-mill; and Harrison the historian, two centuries later, says that his wife ground her malt at home upon her quern. Among the Romans poor freemen used sometimes to hire themselves out to the service Of the mill when all other resources failed; and Plautus is said to have done so, being reduced to the extreme of poverty, and to have composed his comedies while thus employed. This labour, however, fell chiefly upon slaves, and is represented as being the severest drudgery which they had to undergo. Those who had been guilty of any offence were sent to the mill as a punishment, and sometimes forced to work in chains. Asses, however, were used by those who could afford it. The bas-relief at the head of this chapter represents an ass in a mill, and he seems to be blindfolded, to prevent his taking fright. That useful animal seems to have been employed in the establishment we are describing, for the fragment of a jaw-bone, with several teeth in it, was found in a room which seems to have been the stable; and the floor about the mills is paved with rough pieces of stone, while in the rest of the rooms it is made of stucco or compost. The use of water-mills, however, was not unknown to the Romans. Vitruvius describes their construction in terms not inapplicable to the mechanism of a common mill of the present day, and other ancient authors refer to them. "Set not your hands to the mill, O women that turn the millstone! sleep sound though the cock's crow announce the dawn, for Ceres has charged the nymphs with the labours which employed your arms. These, dashing from the summit of a wheel, make its axle revolve, which, by the help of moving radii, sets in action the weight of four bellow mills. We taste anew the life of the first men, since we have learnt to enjoy, without fatigue, the produce of Ceres."