446 Proceedings, 



which they played no unimportant parts, and hence the nervous simpHcity of the language 

 they employed. If the Greeks as poets and historians have left us in their writings 

 models of compositions which have never been surpassed, they were also the greatest 

 sculptors and architects that the world has produced, as well as being consummate 

 geometricians, whilst they also excelled in astronomical and medical science. The heroes of 

 the Iliad, those especially who had been liberally educated, according to the standard of that 

 day, were not mere fighting men, but skilful mechanics, who prided themselves on the 

 excellence of their work, and spared no pains to bring it to perfection. In that episode in 

 the wanderings of Ulysses which is related in the sixth and seventh books of the Odyssey, 

 and which will be always read with delight on account of the exquisite description of the 

 well-ordered home in Corfu, of which the fair Nausicaa was the brightest ornament ; 

 Ulysses is described as being struck with admiration at the sight of the v/ell piled entrance 

 to the harbour, and we have allusions to the systematic division of the waste lands 

 amongst the first settlers in Corfu, the erection of houses and temples for the use of the 

 new arrivals, and the supply of water to the port town, whilst Nausicaa extols her 

 father's thoughtfulness for his household in bringing through the domestic offices a stream 

 of water by means of pipes laid from the springs in his allotment. Even Nausicaa 

 herself shows her mechanical instinct when she asks her father for the loan of the mule- 

 cart with " high " wheels, that she may lose no time whilst taking the family washing to 

 the public washing troughs, erected by the municipal authorities near the beach, at some 

 distance from the town. So again, amongst the ruins of Ephesus, recently laid open by 

 the excavations made under the direction of Mr. Wood ; whilst we are struck mth the 

 richness of the sculptured decorations of the temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians, 

 we are brought face to face with evidences of the attention paid to geodesy as shown by 

 the boundary stones fixing the widths of the roads and watercourses, and by a decree 

 recorded in one of the inscriptions, that in the division of an estate on the foreclosure of 

 a mortgage, roads must be set out to the homesteads, the temples, and the springs of 

 water. What does all this mean, but that science and art went hand in hand in the 

 training of the Greek, and were mseparably connected with every detail of public and 

 private life. 



And when we turn from Greece to Eonie in her palmiest days, we find the same state 

 of things to prevail, except that the art was less pure, and that there was a greater 

 development in the direction of the mechanical science. At the bottom of the success of 

 the Romans as conquerers and colonisers, lay the broad fact that they were the greatest 

 engineers of the time. Their harbours, their aqeducts, their bridges, their lines of road 

 through Europe, and the public buildings erected wherever their dominion extended, are 

 simply so many illustrations of applied science in a high state of development. If Virgil 

 wrote his iEneid to the delight of Emperors and the torment of school boys, he wrote also 

 on sowing and reaping, the breeding of stock, and the keeping of bees. Cesar's commen- 

 taries woidd never have been handed down to us as models of precis writing, if Caesar 

 himself had not been an able engineer officer, whose writings are marked by the clearness 

 of arrangement and precision of detail which characterised his movements for the 

 reduction of the Gauhsh fortresses ; and Cicero's attack upon the tribune Clodius, in 

 which the latter is accused of desecrating the ashes of his Alban forefathers, had for its 

 immediate occasion, the laying out of the road through Alba, Longa, near Rome, when 

 the engineers employed on its ahgnment, cut through the ancient necropolis, which even 

 at that remote date, had been buried for unknown ages under the tufas of the long 

 extinct volcano of Mont Albano, If then we would truly follow the example left us by the 



