Milizia says of Theodoric, "Is this the language of a Gothic barbarian, the destroyer of good taste? Pericles, Alexander, Adrian, or one of the Medici could not have reasoned better." And again, "Can these Goths be the inventors of that architecture vulgarly called Gothic? and are these the barbarians said to have been the destroyers of the beautiful monuments of antiquity? Ecclesiastical history gives to the good Christians and the jealous ecclesiastics the honor of having dismantled temples, and disfigured statues in Italy, Greece, Asia, and Egypt. * * * It is clear that the Goths were not the authors of that architecture called Gothic. The Goths and barbarians who overran Italy had not any characteristic architecture, good or bad. They brought with them neither architects, painters, nor poets. They were all soldiers, and when fixed in Italy employed Italian artists; but as in that country, good taste was much on the decline, it now became more debased, notwithstanding the efforts made by the Goths to revive it." ARCHIMEDES. This wonderful genius was of royal descent, and born at Syracuse about B.C. 287. He was a relative of king Hiero, who held him in the highest esteem and favor, though he does not appear to have held any public office, preferring to devote himself entirely to science. Such was his enthusiasm, that he appears at times to have been so completely absorbed in contemplation and calculations, as to be totally unconscious of what was passing around him. We cannot fully estimate his services to mathematics, for want of an acquaintance with the previous state of science; still we know that he enriched it with discoveries of the highest importance, upon which the moderns have founded their admeasurements of curvilinear surfaces and solids. Euclid, in his elements, considers only the relations of some of these magnitudes to each other, but does not compare them with surfaces and solids bounded by straight lines. Archimedes developed the proportions necessary for effecting this comparison, in his treatises on the sphere and cylinder, the spheroid and conoid, and in his work on the measure of the circle. He rose to still more abstruse considerations in his treatise on the spiral. Archimedes is also the only one of the ancients who has left us anything satisfactory on the theory of mechanics and hydrostatics. He first taught the principle "that a body immersed in a fluid, loses as much in weight, as the weight of an equal volume of the fluid." He discovered this while bathing, which is said to have caused him so much joy that he ran home from the bath undressed, exclaiming, "I have found it; I have found it!" By means of this principle, he determined how much alloy a goldsmith had added to a crown which king Hiero had ordered of pure gold. Archimedes had a profound knowledge of mechanics, and in a moment of enthusiasm, with which the extraordinary performances of his