A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tion of the conditions under which ancient books were 

 produced to realize how slow and difficult the process 

 was before the invention of printing. The taste of 

 the book-buying public demanded a clearly written 

 text, and in the Middle Ages it became customary to 

 produce a richly ornamented text as well. The 

 script employed being the prototype of the modern 

 printed text, it will be obvious that a scribe could 

 produce but a few pages at best in a day. A large 

 work would therefore require the labor of a scribe 

 for many months or even for several years. We may 

 assume, then, that it would be a very flourishing 

 publisher who could produce a hundred volumes all 

 told per annum; and probably there were not many 

 publishers at any given time, even in the period of 

 Rome's greatest glory, who had anything like this 

 output. 



As there was a large number of authors in every 

 generation of the classical period, it follows that most 

 of these authors must have been obliged to content 

 themselves with editions numbering very few copies; 

 and it goes without saying that the greater number 

 of books were never reproduced in what might be 

 called a second edition. Even books that retained 

 their popularity for several generations would presently 

 fail to arouse sufficient interest to be copied ; and in due 

 course such works would pass out of existence alto- 

 gether. Doubtless many hundreds of books were thus 

 lost before the close of the classical period, the names o| 

 their authors being quite forgotten, or preserved only 

 through a chance reference; and of course the work 

 of elimination went on much more rapidly during the 



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