never beget the fancies of the closet and the brothel. Beside these two rich sources, language and mythology, Vico names and employs a third, which he calls the "great fragments of the ancient world," that is to say, the memories preserved by historians and poets, such as the Egyptian tradition of the three ages of gods, heroes and men; the language of the gods mentioned in Homer; the thirty thousand names of the gods collected by Varro and referring to a like number of needs in the natural, moral, economic and civil life of the earliest times; the grove of Romulus, which Livy calls "the ancient plan of founding cities," and a few other golden sayings of ancient historians. Till now these fragments had been useless for the purposes of science, lying as they did in dirt, confusion and incompleteness: but when cleaned, restored and fitted together they conveyed valuable information. Nor did he overlook the monuments of architecture and sculpture, though the use he made of them was slight, and he saw that they were in the long run of little practical value. He declared that as for the historic period the most certain documents are the public coins, so for the legendary and obscure period their place is taken by "certain traces remaining in marble," as proofs of ancient customs, like the Egyptian pyramids with their hieroglyphic inscriptions and other fragments of the ancient world found in every region and bearing similar pictographic characters. It is also worthy of remark that he gives examples of arguments founded on technical observations and leading to conclusions in the sphere of prehistoric archaeology: as for instance when he says that one early period of human life is distinguished by the eating of roasted flesh, the simplest and least elaborate kind of food, because it requires nothing except the fire: a later period by boiled flesh, which also requires water, caldron and tripod.