conducted to the most brilliant discoveries. It was thus that Galileo was conducted to some of his discoveries in hydrostatics by the hints of Archimedes. Indeed, how many of the most important discoveries of science have thus originated? Had Archimedes and Pappus never written, or had they been neglected, the method of tangential lines of Fermat and Barrow, approximating so closely as they do to the discovery of the differential calculus, had perhaps never existed, and to these we must attribute the subsequent important discovery of Newton and Leibnitz. Indeed, the whole history of scientific discovery is the history of a chain whose links have been forged by different men, and fitted at different times. If such be the most fortunate mode of scientific discovery, how much do we increase the importance of the study of the ancient literature, when we come to reflect that the termination of their scientific labors during the night of the middle ages, is the point of departure from which all modern scientific discovery has emanated. It will at once be recollected that at the revival of letters, the only sources of information were derived from the study of the ancients revived chiefly by Boccacio and the philosophers of the Medici school and from the Arabians, whose knowledge was drawn chiefly though at an early period from the same source. Notwithstanding the elegant rivalry between the Abassides and Ommoiades, which so much fostered the spirit of learned inquiry, notwithstanding the resort of the Arabian philosophers to the Indian school, and the polite and elevated spirit of the Saracen conquerers who offered peace to the modern and degenerate Greeks in exchange for their philosophy, it is still evident that with the exception of some few discoveries in the science of medicine, they were yet far behind the ancients at the period of the decay of letters. Ancient science became the text upon which modern writings were for ages the commentary, one of its languages became the medium of communication between the learned and polite of all nations, and no book of science was published for a long time except in the Latin. The writings of mathematicians as far down as Euler, those in medicine in England as far down as Hunter, the writings of Blumenback, of Grotius and Spinoza, the Novum Organon of Bacon, and indeed those of nearly all the modern philosophers, until the middle of the seventeenth century, {227} were in Latin. In Belles Lettres, criticism and rhetoric, in history, physics and morals, the models of the moderns were all chosen from antiquity. In addition to this too, the progress of Roman arms, and afterwards the advance of Roman letters, had incorporated much of the Latin language and idiom in all of the polite modern languages except the German. The Italian and Spanish in particular have been well called "bastard Latin." How then can any student of modern literature only, hope to