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PREFACE.

compararatively, the same degree of perfection in Marine Architecture hadbeen acquired by the artists of antiquity, which, it has been allowed, withfar less opposition, they reached in other branches of study, mechanics, andphilosophy itself. In all points which regard the actual, or supposed wantsof mankind, the mind naturally rests content with having reached thatsummit which appears to promise a full completion of its wishes ; and itwere absurd to expect, that the naval artist of the first century, when hehad no enemy to contend with, possessing vessels superior to his own; noseas or perils to encounter, (while the properties of the loadstone conti-nued unknown to him) which the vessels he built, even granting themto be unwieldy, were not considered competent to brave; should haveattempted any innovation in the science, as practised by his forefathers,which did not seem warranted by necessity, which might be productive ofmischief, and which certainly did not promise to afford any advantage tohim whatever.

The Roman name, and the Roman mind, however fashionable it may beto call one great, and the other comprehensive, was narrowed and con-tracted, on account of that circumscribed knowlege of natural philosophy,geography, and astronomy, which mankind then actually possessed. Littleinclined to expeditions of mere discovery, Rome sought not to becomeacquainted with any country whose remote situation appeared to defy itsarms ; and it hesitated not, almost without exception, to bestow the nameof barbarians on the inhabitants of those districts whose manners or cus-toms were indistinctly known to them. This fact, too well established tobe controverted, or even disputed, may prove a brief and conclusive answerto all wonder, why a people, whose judgment, whose taste, and whose con-summate knowlege in what were considered the polite arts, should havesuffered their desires to be sated by so moderate an acquaintance with ascience, which might have glutted their ambition in the widest extent thelust of power could possibly figure to itself, or pant for. . ;

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