Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1890 — Believed Part of It. [ARTICLE]

Believed Part of It.

Will—A peculiar thing happened to me the other night. Bill—What was it? Will—l was asleep and the stopping of my clock woke me up. Bill—The stopping of your clock ? Will—Yes. Don’t you believe it ? Bill—Oh, yes; I believe the clock stopped. A map by Padre Marchi shows that one of the Roman catacombs occupies an area of nine furlongs in greatest length by seven in greatest width. A recent calculation from this map places the area of the entire series of catacombs at sixty times this amount, and the total length of the subterranean streets at not less than 500 miles. This agrees very closely with Padre Marchi’s estimate by a different method. He conjectured that there may have been twenty confraternities of diggers, and that these might have excavated about seventy feet of road and 100 graves every day; and this, taking two complete centuries as the time which the catacombs continued to be used as Christian cemeteries, gives a total of 720 miles, and 6,000,000 graves—figures, however, that Padre Marchi considered much too small.