That the arts had their rise in the East, and that they were conveyed thence to the Greeks, and from them to the Romans, is universally admitted. Respecting the inventions and discoveries however of the earliest ages, nothing certain is known. Many of those most useful in common life must have been the production of periods when men were little acquainted with letters, or any sure mode of transmitting an account of their improvements to succeeding generations. The taste which then prevailed of giving to every thing a divine origin, rendered traditional accounts fabulous; and the exaggeration of poets tended more and more to make such authorities less worthy of credit. A variety of works also, which might have supplied us with information on this subject, have been lost; and the relations of some of those preserved are so corrupted and obscure, that the best commentators have not been able to illustrate them. This in particular is the case with many passages in Pliny, an author who appears to have collected with the utmost diligence whatever he thought useful or curious, and whose desire of communicating knowledge seems to have been equal to his thirst for acquiring it. Of all those nations whose history has been preserved, the most distinguished are certainly the Greeks and the Romans; but, as far as can be judged at this remote period, the former were superior to the latter in point of invention. The Romans indeed seem to have known little, except what they borrowed from the Grecians; and it is evident, by their sending their young men of rank to finish their education in Greece, that they considered that country as the seat of the arts and the sciences, and as a school where genius would be excited by the finest models, while the taste was corrected and formed. From some hints given however by Pliny and other writers, we have reason to conclude that the Romans possessed more knowledge of the arts than the moderns perhaps are willing to allow, and that some inventions, considered as new, may be only old ones revived and again rendered useful.