hundred years old.' The Frenchman says, 'I am the best dyer in Europe; nobody can equal me, and nobody can surpass Lyons.' Yet in Cashmere, where the girls make shawls worth thirty thousand dollars, they will show him three hundred distinct colors which he not only cannot make but cannot even distinguish.... Mr. Colton, of the Boston Journal, the first week he landed in Asia, found that his chronometer was out of order from the steel of the works having become rusted. The London Medical and Surgical Journal advises surgeons not to venture to carry any lancets to Calcutta; to have them gilded, because English steel could not bear the atmosphere of India. Yet the Damascus blades of the Crusades were not gilded, and they are as perfect as they were eight centuries ago.... If a London chronometer-maker wants the best steel to use in his chronometer, he does not send to Sheffield, the centre of all science, but to the Punjaub, the empire of the five rivers, where there is no science at all.... Scott, in his Crusaders, describes a meeting between Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin. Saladin asks Richard to show him the wonderful strength for which he is famous, and the Norman monarch responds by severing a bar of iron which lies on the floor of the tent. Saladin says, 'I cannot do that;' but he takes an eider-down pillow from the sofa, and drawing his keen blade across it, it falls in two pieces. Richard says, 'This is the black art; it is magic; it is the devil; you cannot cut that which has no resistance;' and Saladin, to show him that such is not the case, takes a scarf from his shoulders, which is so light that it almost floats in the air, and, tossing it up, severs it before it can descend. George Thompson saw a man in Calcutta throw a handful of floss silk into the air, and a Hindoo sever it into pieces with his sabre.... Mr. Batterson, of Hartford, walking with Brunel, the architect of the Thames Tunnel, in Egypt, asked him what he thought of the mechanical power of the Egyptians, and he said, 'There is Pompey's Pillar; it is one hundred feet high, and the capital weighs two thousand pounds. It is something of a feat to hang two thousand pounds at that height in the air, and the few men that can do it would better discuss Egyptian mechanics.'... We have only just begun to understand ventilation properly for our houses, yet late experiments at the pyramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the most perfect and scientific manner. Again, cement is modern, for the ancients dressed and jointed their stones so closely that in buildings thousands of years old the thin blade of a penknife cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a knowledge of steam. Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville says there was no social question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt."