A more essential question was that of the method of studying and judging political institutions and laws; a question upon which Montesquieu has been compared with Vico and accused of freely using the _Scienza Nuova_ without acknowledging his debt. It is now established through Montesquieu's journal that in 1728 Antonio Conti at Venice advised the future author of the _Esprit des Lois_ to buy Vico's book at Naples; and Montesquieu must have followed this advice on reaching Naples in the following year; for a copy of the 1725 edition of the _Scienza Nuova_ is still preserved in the library at the château of La Brède. But the mind of the French writer was too different from and inferior to that of Vico to draw vital nourishment from a work such as the _Scienza Nuova;_ and the traces of imitation alleged to have been discovered in the _Esprit des Lois_ are very doubtful and in any case of minor importance. It must be said on the other hand that the merit generally attributed to Montesquieu of having introduced the historical element into positive laws and thus considering legislation in a truly philosophical manner (as Hegel said later), that is, as a moment depending upon a totality relative to all the other determinations which go to form the character of a people or a period; this merit, in order both of time and of excellence, belongs in reality to Vico. Like Montesquieu in the science of legislation, so Wolf in the Homeric question has been suspected of tacitly deriving help from Vico's speculations. But at the time when he published the _Prolegomena ad Homerum_ in 1795 Wolf did not know the _Scienza Nuova_; which he knew in name only in 1801 and in fact the year after, when Cesarotti presented him with the book. We must observe that Vico's judgment as to the barbaric nature of the Homeric epos and the absence in it of esoteric wisdom had been published in 1765 by the _Gazette littéraire de l'Europe_; and further, that the _Scienza Nuova_ was known and used by the Danish philologist and archaeologist Zoega, who quotes it in an essay on Homer composed in 1788 though not published till long afterwards; and that Zoega corresponded with Heyne, who afterwards accused Wolf of having derived from his own lectures the theory set forth in the _Prolegomena._ Heyne had in fact expressed the idea of a gradual genesis of the Homeric poems in 1790. In a word we may say that Vico's views had to some extent penetrated into the atmosphere of German philology: in which case Wolf may have originally had a certain indirect knowledge of them. Even apart from this indirect communication the fact remains, and is recognised by all students of the question, that the Homeric theory conceived by Wolf must really be called not Wolfian but Vician, since such it truly is in its fundamental characteristics. Moreover, Wolf, as a philologist far superior to Vico but much less great as a thinker, was not in a position to understand