CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 267 



To get an idea of the tardiness of their progress in the useful arts, we 

 might compare the difference in material culture between the time of 

 Pericles and that of Constantine on the one hand, and between Bar- 

 barossa's time and our own on the other. All industrial occupations 

 among the ancients were, for the most part, confined to the servile class. 

 This is the reason often assigned for the low state of industrial art 

 among them. But may we not rather recognize, in the contempt of 

 the freemen for industrial occupation, their small capacity for the same? 

 However this may be, the material culture of the ancients evinces a 

 one-sidedness and an imperfectness corresponding to the deficiencies we 

 have already found to exist in their theoretical culture. 



Hence comes the disproportion between technical and aesthetic per- 

 formance, so often noticed in the products of ancient art-industry. In 

 our museums, every one admires the candelabra brought from the villas 

 of wealthy Romans, which were destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius. 

 From light bronze branches, whose leaves seem to flutter in every breath 

 of air, are suspended by slender chains a number of beautifully-fash- 

 ioued lamps. By the light of these lamps Caesar wrote his " Commen- 

 taries," Cicero rounded his periods, Horace gave the last polish to his 

 " Odes." Each lamp is simply an oil-holder, into which dips a wick 

 a smoky affair, that no scullery-girl would tolerate nowadays. The idea 

 of discovering the source of the light given by the lamp ; of finding it 

 in a more or less perfect combustion of a combination rich in carbon a 

 combustion carried only so far that, in the hot but not luminous flame 

 produced by perfect combustion, some solid carbon-particles shall be 

 brought to a white heat ; of bringing about this degree of combustion by 

 regulating the supply of air and oil ; meantime, of protecting the flame 

 from air-currents, saving the surrounding objects from smut, and guard- 

 ing the organ of smell from the offensive odors of acrolein such 

 thoughts never once appear to have occurred to the minds of the artists 

 of Magna Grrecia. For them, the most perfect lamp was the one that 

 was the most ornamental. If more light was needed, other smudgy 

 lamps were added. 



Thus the ancient culture resembled one of those coins on which a 

 master-hand had stamped a noble countenance of some deity, but which 

 he could not make round. We may, therefore, justly characterize this 

 civilization as being essentially aesthetic, and the attitude of the an- 

 cients toward Nature as speculative and cesthetic. 



The backwardness of the ancients in natural science was fruitful in 

 most serious consequences to the human race. It was one of the chief 

 reasons of the downfall of the old civilization. The greatest misfortune 

 that ever befell humanity, namely, the overrunning of the Mediterra- 

 nean countries by the barbarians, could have been prevented had the 

 ancients possessed natural science as we understand that term. 



This point has not, perhaps, been sufficiently noted hitherto. When 

 Montesquieu and Gibbon described the fall of the Roman Empire, nat- 



