The succeeding sentence is even more obscure; and, unless it be interpolated or out of its proper place, is quite unintelligible. In the connection in which it now stands it is absurd. It is as follows: “Quo apparet antiquiorem hanc fuisse scientiam quam fundendi æris,”—by which it seems that this knowledge or practice was older than that of casting in bronze. What is the “scientiam” to which he refers? He has previously spoken only of two: first, that of making portraits in plaster and wax; second, that of making copies of statues in clay,—both, as he says, invented or introduced into practice by Lysistratus. But to say that that artist could have invented any process older than that of casting in bronze is not only ridiculous in itself, but inconsistent with what he has previously told us; since at least two centuries previous to the time of Lysistratus, Rhœcus and Theodorus of Samos—as we learn from Pausanias, Herodotus, and even Pliny himself—exercised the art of casting in bronze. Pausanias,[13] indeed, tells us that these sculptors invented this art; but Pliny, with his usual inaccuracy and carelessness, says that they invented “plastice,” or the art of modeling (“In Samo primos omnium plasticen invenisse Rhœcum et Theodorum,” ch. xxxv.),—an art which from the very nature of things must have been practiced from the earliest and rudest ages, almost from the time when the first child made the first mud-pie. Dr. Brunn,[14] in commenting on this passage in Pliny, accepts the first sentence as describing the art of casting in plaster, but, finding it impossible to reconcile it with the subsequent sentences, ingeniously suggests that it was an addition inserted in the margin, and afterwards interpolated into the text by the copyists in the wrong place. Throwing out this first sentence about Lysistratus from this place, he still accepts it, and interprets it to mean that Lysistratus invented the art of casting. The subsequent sentences he connects with a previous passage in Pliny, in which he gives an account of Dibutades of Sicyon, a potter by trade, and relates the legend that this artist drew the outline of the face of a girl whom he loved from her shadow on the wall, and his father pressed clay upon it within those outlines, and made a _typum_ which he baked. The passage, according to Dr. Brunn, then would continue: “He [Dibutades] also invented the making of effigies from signa, and this practice so increased that thenceforward no statues or signa were made without argilla; so that it appears that this art was more ancient than that of casting in bronze.” By accepting this suggestion of Dr. Brunn we certainly relieve Pliny of the absurdity of stating that any “scientiam” or practice invented by Lysistratus was older than casting in bronze, since centuries before his time bronze figures of colossal proportions had been cast. But even supposing these sentences to refer to Dibutades and not to