The following year appeared Vico's first constructively philosophical and historical work: the _De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae Latinae originibus eruenda,_ or rather the first book of that work (Naples, Mosca, 1710): the other two were never written, but we can form an idea of their intended contents from what is said in the Autobiography. Beside Vico's theory of knowledge in its first form and the metaphysic which he always maintained in its entirety, the _De antiquissima_ contained an attempt to reconstitute for the first time primitive wisdom, or rather one particular instance of primitive wisdom, that of Italy; but as we have already said in the text of our exposition the attempt was founded on the idea that this wisdom was philosophical, and conducted according to the criterion of the transmission of culture which Vico subsequently rejected, as he rejected the traditional opinion, accepted in this work, of the Athenian origin of the laws of the Twelve Tables. We must accordingly refuse to accept Cantoni's verdict (_G. B. Vico,_ p. 38) that the _De antiquissima_ forms "a strange anomaly in the history of Vico's thought, being contrary to his whole scientific life, his tendencies, his principles, and the method which later he almost universally applies in his historical researches." The reverse is in fact the case: namely that this work is the starting-point of his future developments and that without it we cannot understand his later thought. The criticisms directed by the _Giornale dei letterati d' Italia_ (1711, vols. v. and viii.) against the historical and some of the philosophical positions of the _De antiquissima_ evoked Vico's two important _Replies_ (Naples, Mosca, 1711 and 1712) in which he defends and elucidates his views on the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. The part of the _De antiquissima_ that never went to the press included his meditations on the philosophy of medicine, from which he extracted an essay _De aequilibrio corporis animantis:_ this he thought of publishing many years later, but it is now lost. Of these studies, therefore, as of his speculations upon physics intended to constitute a _Liber physicus,_ we know only what he tells us in his autobiography.