slight a difference, and treating as identical those which were really different. There does not exist a more singular mass of confusion than in Pliny’s account of the different nations. I know from experience, how many stages a man has to pass through before he arrives at positive certainty upon such questions. Garve very truly says, “the second is the beginning.” A person assuming that in Italy everything was originally different, feels as if a wheel were spinning round in his head; and he soon arrives at the conviction that his supposition has no meaning, and gives up the whole matter in despair. I have experienced this same thing, but did not rest until I arrived at a definite result. The subject does not suffer from its being confused: many things are treated with scorn, merely because they are abused; if things were not represented in a false light, there would be no danger of things deserving attention ever being scorned. But it does happen, when things are erroneously conceived, and are defended with obstinacy, when they cannot be defended at all. It is the sad but natural consequence of such a defence of what is opposed to reason and truth, that many men despise even that which is deserving of consideration. Hence so many follies. A fancy of this kind during the period of my youth, was the belief in perfectibility, when people imagined that in every respect they were far above their ancestors. But it is an equally great folly unconditionally to praise our ancestors, and to forget that there is an endless number of points in which we move sometimes forward and sometimes backward. The question whether an entire period is superior or inferior to another, is of a very different nature, and one which it is difficult to answer, if it is put in a rational way. I should least of all wish to exchange the present time for the middle ages, which fools only praise as the happiest era in history. There can be no doubt that in the middle ages life was more intense, sympathies were stronger, and activity was more vigorous; but our age has other advantages, and our progress in science especially is immense. When I compare the moral condition of our age with what it was a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago, I cannot hesitate for a moment, with a full knowledge of all the facts, to say that our age, not only in Germany, but even in France, is infinitely better. He, therefore, is the true friend of antiquity who disentangles it from its confusion and places it in its true light. The ancients knew but little about the nations of Italy, and later writers, especially Pliny, knew no more, so that we cannot even discern how far Cato saw clearly in this matter, and how far not. He still recognised that the Aborigines of Latium belonged to a race akin to the Greeks, a fact which Varro no longer understood. From Fabius down to Cato and Pliny, the knowledge of the early history of Italy decreased more and more.