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Entered according to Act of Congress, in June, 1869, by J. W. Burke & Cos., in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the So. District of Georgia Vol. Ill — No. 50. BREAD 1800 YEARS OLD. copy the following from that v ery interesting publication, Wonders of Pompeii , one of Scribner & Co.’s “Illustrated Library of Wonders : ” Bakeries were not lacking in Pom peii. The most complete one is in the street, of Hercula neum, where it fills a whole house, the inner court of which is occupied with four mills. Nothing could be more crude and elementary than those mills. Imagine two huge blocks of stone repre senting two cones, of which the upper one is overset upon the other, giving every mill the appearance of an hour glass. The lower stone re mained motionless, and the other revolved by means of an apparatus kept in motion by a man or a donkey. The grain was crushed between the two stones in the old pa triarchal style. The poor ass condemned to do this work must have been a very patient animal; but what shall we say of the slaves often called in to fill his place? For those poor wretches it was usually a punishment, as their eyes were put out and then they were sent to the mill. This was the menace held over their heads when they misbehaved. For others it w r as a very simple piece of ser vice which more than one man of mind performed —Plautus, they say, and lei ence. To some again, it was, at a later period, a method of paying for their vices 5 when the millers lacked hands they established bathing-houses around their mills, and the passers-by who were caught in the trap had to work the ma chinery. Let us hasten to add that the work ol the mill which we visited was not per formed by a Christian, as they would say at Naples, but by a mule, whose bones were found in a neighboring room, most likely a stable, the racks and troughs of which were elevated about two and a half feet above the floor. In a closet near by, the watering trough is still visible. Mills driven by the wind were un known to the ancients, and water-mills Di-covertes of Loaves of Bread baked 1800 years ago in a Baker’s Oven. « UtrTi *•- did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the lack of running water. Hence these mills were put in motion by manual la bor —the old system employed away back in the days of Homer. On the other hand, the institution of complete baking as a trade, with all its dependent processes, did not date so far back. The primitive Romans made their bread in their own houses. Rome was already nearly five hundred years old when the first bakers established stationary mills, to which the proprie tors sent their grain, as they still do in the Neapolitan provinces; in return they got loaves of bread ; that is to say, their material ground, kneaded and MACON, GEORGIA, JUNE n, 1870. baked. The Pompeiian establishment that we visited was one of these com plete bakeries. We could still recognize the troughs that served for the manipulation of the bread, and the oven, the arch of which is intact, with the cavity that retained the ashes, the vase for water to besprin kle'the crust and make it shiny, and, finally, the triple-slued pipe that carried off the smoke—an excellent system re vealed by the Pompeiian excavations and successfully imitated since then. The bake-oven opened upon two small rooms by two apertures. Ihe loaves went in at one of these in dough, and came out at the other baked. The whole thing is in such a perfect state of preservation that one might be tempted to employ these old bricks, that have not been used for eighteen centuries, for the same purpose. The very loaves have survived. In the bakery of which I speak several were found with the stamps upon them, siligo yrani (wheat flour,) or e cicera (of bean flour) a Whole No. 154. ■wise precaution against the bad faith of the dealers. Still more recently, in the latest ex cavations, Signor Fiorelli came across an oven so hermetrically sealed that there was not a particle of ashes in it, and there were eighty-one loaves, a lit tle sad, to be sure, but whole, hard and black, found in the order in which they had been placed on the 28d of November, 79. Enchant ed with this windfall, Fio relli himself climbed into the oven and took out the preci ous relics with his own hands. Most of the loaves weigh about a pound ; the heaviest twelve hundred and four grains. They are round, de pressed in the centre, raised on the edges, and divided in to eight lobes. Loaves are still made in Sicily exactly like them. Prof. De Luca weighed and analyzed them minutely, and gave the result in a letter addressed to the French Academy of Sciences. Let us now imagine all these salesrooms, all these shops, open and stocked with goods, and then the display, the pur chasers, the passers-by, the bustle and noise peculiar to the South, and the street will no longer seem so dead. Let us add that the doors of the houses were closed only in the evening ; the promenaders and loungers could then peep, as they went along, into every alley, and make merry at the bright adornments of the atrium. Nor is this all. The upper stories, although now crumbled to dust, were in communication with the street. Win dows opened discreetly, which must, here and there, have been the frame work of some brown head and counten ance anxious to see and to be seen. The latest excavations have revealed the existence of hanging covered bal conies, long exterior corridors, pierced with casements, frequently depicted in