The time had come when men were required to comprehend the ancients, in order to go beyond them; and at the needful crisis, printing was given to disseminate all precious originals throughout the world, in copies innumerable. Had the gift been bestowed at an earlier period, it would have been disregarded or forgotten, from the want of materials on which to be employed; and had it been much longer postponed, it is probable that many works of the highest order, and most desirable to be multiplied, would have been totally lost. Coincident with this most conservative invention, was the destruction of the Roman empire in the East. In the year 1453, Constantinople was captured by the Turks, and the encouragement which had been shown to literature and science at Florence, induced many learned Greeks to seek shelter and employment in that city. Thus, the progressive races were favored with multiplied facilities for gathering and diffusing those floods of scientific illumination vouchsafed to deliver from the fantasies that had hitherto peopled the world--from the prejudices that had held the human mind in thrall. When Guttenberg raised the first proof-sheet from movable types, the Mosaic record--"God said, let there be light, and light was"--flashed upon earth and heaven with unprecedented glory, and that light of intellect must shoot outward, upward, and abroad forever! It was not a lucky accident, but the golden fruit of omniscient design, an invention made with a perfect consciousness of its power and object, to congregate once isolated inquirers and teachers beneath one temple, wherein divine aspirations might unite and crown with success all the scattered and divided efforts for extending the empire of love and science over the whole civilized earth. On the banks of the same river Rhine, where printing first attained a practical use in the hands of a soldier, the discovery of gunpowder was made by a priest. Its properties were obscurely known long before the crusades, but are said to have been first traced in their real nature by Berthold Schwartz, and were made known in 1336, ten years before cannon appeared in the field of Crecy. Small arms were unknown until nearly two centuries afterward, and were first used by the Spaniards, about the year 1521. Fortified with this new power, Cortez, with a handful of soldiers, was able to conquer the natives of Mexico, the most civilized and powerful of all the nations then on this western continent. From the hour when the blundering monk was blown up by his own experiment, gross physical strength was surrendered to expert military science; and gunpowder has increasingly exalted intellect in the conduct of war, not less than in the triumphs of peace.