SCIENCE IN THE DARK AGE 



happened in Europe during the Middle Ages. At an 

 earlier day books were made and distributed much 

 more abundantly than is sometimes supposed. Book- 

 making had, indeed, been an important profession 

 in Rome, the actual makers of books being slaves 

 who worked under the direction of a publisher. It 

 was through the efforts of these workers that the 

 classical works in Greek and Latin were multiplied 

 and disseminated. Unfortunately the climate of Eu- 

 rope does not conduce to the indefinite preservation 

 of a book ; hence very few remnants of classical works 

 have come down to us in the original from a remote 

 period. The rare exceptions are certain papyrus 

 fragments, found in Egypt, some of which are Greek 

 manuscripts dating from the third century B.C. Even 

 from these sources the output is meagre ; and the only 

 other repository of classical books is a single room in 

 the buried city of Herculaneum, which contained sev- 

 eral hundred manuscripts, mostly in a charred condi- 

 tion, a considerable number of which, however, have 

 been unrolled and found more or less legible. This 

 library in the buried city was chiefly made up of 

 philosophical works, some of which were quite un- 

 known to the modern world until discovered there. 



But this find, interesting as it was from an archaeolog- 

 ical stand -point, had no very important bearing on our 

 knowledge of the literature of antiquity. Our chief de- 

 pendence for our knowledge of that literature must 

 still be placed in such copies of books as were made in 

 the successive generations. Comparatively few of the 

 extant manuscripts are older than the tenth century 

 of our era. It requires but a momentary considera- 



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