There was a time, even in the memory of living men, when Welsh households had little need of aid from commerce, when almost every kind of food was home grown, and almost every article of clothing home spun and home made. Some lament that this is not still the case. Let these, however, console themselves with the knowledge that as mankind progress, they are made, by division of labour, to become more dependent on each other, and that perforce the law of love, of mutual beneficence, is being propagated in the world, not only by the Christian ministry, but by the agency of commercial, scientific, and literary progress. Not only the inhabitants of the same land, but the various nations of the earth are more and more coming to this, that they can less and less do without each other’s co-operation. An early stage of society, like that of animal development, is a medley. It is made up of families or tribes, each of which has its own separate organization; and the tendency is, where selfishness and a contentious spirit predominate, to split up into fragments; whereas, on the other hand, where the domestic virtues are highly advanced, and there is a general disposition to sink private interest in public good, men will cling together, thus forming larger communities, exercising more advanced functions, and eventually absorb those weaker tribes which have not acquired these virtues; that is, have not realized, to the same extent, the principle of many members in one body. It is characteristic of the human mind, in its first attempts to pierce the mists of ignorance and mystery, to embrace, in one view, the whole realm of knowledge, and necessarily to suppose that it is much more limited than it is. The astrologers of old little dreamed that the stars, which were the objects of their superstitions contemplation, were but a small portion of the illimitable universe of worlds. We see at first of any subject which we study but about as much as we see of the stars without the aid of the telescope, or of minute objects near at hand without the aid of the microscope. The realm of knowledge enlarges in proportion as we intimately explore it. The more we discover distinctions, which have been overlooked by previous observers, or the more we differentiate, and at the same time assign the differences their right place in the class, the unity to which they belong, the more we advance that branch of investigation towards which our efforts are turned. In the infancy of knowledge, science, poetry, history, politics, theology, form one medley, like the hydra in the animal world. Pythagoras, because he possessed insufficient powers of abstraction, could not keep mathematics apart from metaphysics, theology, and æsthetics. And Xenophanes must needs, in the philosophical and theological travail of his soul, give expression to his ideas in flowing hexameters. The early ballads were not simply the minstrelsy, but the only chronicles of the period.