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Statue to Sir Isaac Newton. 45 
unknown to him, a predecessor in the ae exploit by which 
he pierced the night of ages, and unfolde : 
eyes ofthe old. The arts afford no exception to the general 
aw. Demosthenes had eminent forerunners, Pericles the last 
of them, Homer must have had predecessors of great _ 
though doubtless as far surpassed by him as Fra Bartolomeo an¢ 
Pietro Perugino were by Michael Angelo and hael. Dante 
owed much to Virgil; he may be allowed to have owed, through 
his Latin Mentor, not a little to the old Grecian; and Milton 
had both the orators and the poets of the ancient world for his 
predecessors and his masters. The art of war itself is no excep- 
tion to the rule. The plan of bringing an overpowering force 
to bear on a given point had been tried occasionally before 
Frederick II. reduced it to a system; and the Wellingtons and 
Napoleons of our own day made it the foundation of their 
Strategy as it had also been previously the main-spring of our 
naval tactics, 
It has oftentimes been held that the invention of logarithms 
stands alone in the history of science, as having been preceded 
by no step leading towards the discovery. There is, however, 
great inaccuracy in this statement, for not only was the doctrine 
of infinitesimals familiar to its illustrious author, and the relation 
of geometrical to arithmetical series well known, but he had 
self struck out several methods of great ingenuity and utility 
(as that known by the name of Napier’s Bones)—methods that 
are now forgotten, eclipsed as they were by the consummation 
which has immortalized his name. So the inventive powers of 
Watt, preceded as he was by Worcester and Newcomen, but far 
more materially by Causs and Papin, had been exercised on 
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