But perhaps the grandest combination of glorious arts it is possible to conceive, was that which existed when Demosthenes addressed six thousand of his countrymen at the Pnyx. In the presence of this vast multitude, he ascended the bema, and saw beneath him the Agora, filled with statues and altars to heroes and gods. To the north lay the olive groves of wisdom, and sunny villages along the fruitful plains beneath the craggy heights of Parnes and Cithæron; while to the south sparkled the blue Ægean, whitened by many a sail. Before him was the Hill of Mars, seat of that most venerable tribunal, the Areopagus. Above him towered the Acropolis, with its temples glittering in the air; on the left, stood the lofty statue of Minerva Promachus, with helmet and spear ready to repel all who dared to invade her pride of place; and on the right, rising in supreme and stately splendor, was the marble Parthenon, glowing with chromatic legends spread behind the colonnades, and relieved with sculpture tipped with gold. The splendid noon of Grecian greatness was succeeded by a splendid evening, divinely prolonged. Mental pre-eminence survived long after her political supremacy was overthrown; and even when trampled in the dust, she still won reverence from her brutal foe. CHAPTER III SCIENCE. If we trace the march of scientific knowledge through the dense strata of departed ages to its root, it will doubtless be found in the remote East, while all prolific growth is toward the West. As often as the storms of conquest have passed over the plains of India, the arts of production continue to be practiced in the very places of their first endeavors. Hindoos of the present day, with no other auxiliaries than their hatchets and hands, can smelt iron, which they will convert into steel, equal to the best prepared in Europe. It is believed that the tools with which the Egyptians covered their obelisks and temples of porphyry and syenite with hieroglyphics, were made of Indian steel. Bailly refers the origin of the arts and sciences, astronomy, the old lunar zodiac, and the discovery of the planets, to northern Asia. Doubtless that was the source of the progressive race, of which science was the chief instrument, and Greek culture the first adequate expression.