It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the largest contribution to this development or has done the most to lift up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the new realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in securing for them again their rights as individual Christians, conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe which had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to them fresh light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball, but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and development. At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind of Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests of Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact, however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but in Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before two printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy, exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by Germany to the scholarship of the world.