GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 165 



staiitia by translating vTr6aTaai<;, and tlie German^ making 

 himself a word for " superstition/' aberglauhe, Flemish over- 

 gt'loof, that is " over-belief," had the super of superstitio before 

 him when he introduced into his language a notion which it 

 had perhaps hardly realized before. To take a more specula- 

 tive case of a very different kind, the tea-urns used in Russia are 

 well known, but where did the Russians get the invention from? 

 They get their tea from China, where tea-urns much resem- 

 bling our own have long been in use. But the apparatus is no 

 new thing in Europe, and the specimen in the Naples Museum, 

 if it were coloured with the conventional chocolate colour, and 

 had a tap put in to replace the original one which is lost, would 

 perhaps be only remarked upon at an English tea-table as be- 

 ing beautiful but old-fashioned. It was kept hot by charcoal 

 burning in a tube in the middle, like the Russian urns. Now 

 the name of a vessel just answering this description has been 

 preserved, authepsa {av6e'^7]<;, "self-boiler"), and of this term 

 the Russian name for their urns, samovar, " self-boiler," is an 

 exact translation. The coincidence suggests that they may 

 have received both the thing and its name through Constanti- 

 nople. Moreover, there is reason to think that the Western 

 element in Chinese art is far more important than is popularly 

 supposed, and the tea-urn is so peculiar an apparatus, and so 

 strikingly alike in ancient Italy and in China, that it is scarcely 

 possible that the two should be the results of separate inven- 

 tion. Imperfect as the evidence is, there is at least some 

 ground for the view that the hot water urn originated very 

 early in Europe, and travelled east as far as China. 



It often happens that an old art or custom, which has been 

 superseded for general purposes by some more convenient ar- 

 rangement, is kept up long afterwards in solemn ceremonies 

 and other matters under the control of priests and officials, 

 who are commonly averse to change ; as inventions have often 

 to wait long after they have come into general use before they 

 are officially recognized. Wooden tallies were given for re- 

 ceipts by our Exchequer up to the time of George IV., as if to 

 keep up, as long as might be, the remembrance of the time 

 when " our forefathers had no other books but the score and 



