The possession of fire turned winter into summer and night into day. It lengthened the life-time of its fortunate possessors. But it did much more than that. It endowed mankind with a number of gifts which must, in his primitive condition, have appeared to him as supernatural. It gave him substances which combined the hardness of stone with the toughness of wood. It enabled him to mould these substances into any desired shape by the softening action of excessive heat. Hephæstus himself cast his products in bronze, having cunningly mixed copper with tin in order to produce an alloy combining hardness with ductility. But he and his later disciples found the perfect substance in iron, which, though requiring an extreme degree of heat, yielded weapons and tools of unsurpassed power and strength. And thus it was that Hephæstus and his human allies prepared that career of conquest which eventually swept over the earth and made all things new. The unprogressive Zeus, content with having learnt how to shake Olympus with a nod of his head, perished in the flood of new ideas from the East. Hephæstus, alone of all that shining company, had established a firm footing in the world. For the work of his hands had trained his brain and enabled it to build up a scheme of the cosmos in which every detail corresponded to some ascertained reality. And so, while Egyptian priests were speculating about the weight of a soul, while Hindu sects were vying with each other in producing the most hideous idols, and while Christian theologians were endeavouring to prove that three ones make one, Hephæstus and his followers were engaged in founding that superb edifice of knowledge which was destined to outlast the fall of empires and the dark ages which followed the eclipse of classical learning.