Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/271

Rh have settled, that the so-called Temple of Serapis was not a temple at all, but a public bath, a conclusion that forces itself upon the mind of any untheoretical observer of the general architectural structure of the place. If a bath, nothing is so probable, as that its level should have been fixed with reference to the sea, such that sea-water would run in, or command the baths, in a place where there appears to have been no fresh water except that of the thermal spring. The possible objection to this, that there would then be no drainage for the waste water of the baths is met by the fact, that the dry and porous subsoil, consisting of 12 to 20 feet of tufa, lapilli, and scoriæ, would soak away any amount of water, if simply discharged into a pit sunk in it, below the level of the baths, a method of drainage actnally practised from a remote age to the present day. A considerable district of Paris at present discharges the whole of its sewage into such a "puit d'absorption."

The land at the existing level of the terrace called La Starza, upon which the temple was built, is in rapid and constant process of marine degradation at present; so much so, that unless artificial means be soon taken to prevent its inroads, the sea will in another half-century probably, have swept away the whole temple (so called).

It therefore was probably very much more inland when first constructed, and was probably built either in some natural depression, of 10 or 12 feet below the sea level, or in one excavated to that depth, by a race whose burrowing tendencies are revealed by many of their buildings, in all directions around. If much inland, there was doubtless a sufficient mass, though of porous material, between it and the sea, to be water-tight; but if, as more and more of this