der from mouth to mouth before they were intrusted to the graphic symbols; from this moment they disappeared from memory. Written language is the downfall of tradition.
The history of the rise of the two great races of antiquity, the Greek and the Roman, is barren of important inventions. Their blue sky made them wellnigh independent of Nature. Amid the cheerful enjoyment of the natural, intellect in Greece flourished as never before or afterward in any clime; the age of Pericles—
"The age of godlike fantasy,
Is vanished, never to return."
The palmy days soon passed away, however; the mountainous land of small extent succumbed first to the Macedonian, then to the Roman victor. The descendants of the conquerors of Asia became private teachers to the Roman grandees.
Rome herself developed into political greatness only. With the exception of her historians, her scientific lustre was merely a faint image of Grecian culture, very much like German literature of the first half of the eighteenth century when compared with the times of Louis XIV. and Queen Anne. No remarkable invention, of lasting benefit to humanity, sprang from the Romans. Even the weapons of war, down to the invention of gunpowder, remained the same as when Glaucus and Diomedes handled them. Shield, spear, and sword, had changed shape and size, but none of their functions.
Not until the invention of gunpowder was the aspect of society essentially changed. A bit of charcoal, a nitre-crystal, and a few grains of sulphur mixed together, made up a powder that rent mountains and crushed walls. At once all the then prevailing systems of attack and defence were overthrown. The nation most advanced in technical matters became the most powerful. With a few thousand blunderbusses, a handful of adventurers conquered a new continent. The history of the invention of gunpowder is as yet a myth. Very likely, an accident was the main cause. Science claims no reward. Then came a series of inventions and discoveries, each of which played an important part in framing society anew. The compass emboldened the mariner to leave the coast for the open sea, and helped to discover a new continent and circumnavigate an old one; the telescope revealed celestial spaces hitherto unknown; the laws of the pendulum, discovered at that epoch, the laws of compressed air, of the circulation of the blood, of the motions of the planets, furnished important building-material with which to rear culture and civilization. The newly-invented art of printing rendered the sources of knowledge accessible to all. Our purpose is not to unfold all this in detail; but it was necessary to show the distances of those stopping-points where history changes horses in order to go forward with renewed vigor. With the invention of printing, history commenced making more rapid strides. A
