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HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

existence of such territories was fully known, afforded little amusement, andstill less information, to that very inconsiderable number of persons, who,when Rome was supposed in the zenith of her glory, both with respect toarms and arts, addicted themselves solely to the pursuit of scientific, or to usea more abstract, and perhaps proper term, mechanical knowlege. The customsof the ancients, as well in respect to their public, and domestic concerns, astheir literary pursuits, were of that nature which rather forbad enquiry andinvestigation, either as to the particular arts practised by countries whichGreece and Rome progressively considered as uncivilised, or the history of thosedistricts which were despised, as being in a state of almost complete igno-rance and barbarism. In mechanics, the Romans considered themselves, andgenerally speaking, perhaps, with no small degree of truth, superior both tothe people they subdued, and those to whose arms, in the later ages, they them-selves fell a sacrifice. They considered the knowlege of arts so interwoven,as it were, with their very natures, that it was impossible it should ever sink ;literature would therefore have deemed that as a useles waste of time, whichwas expended in preserving to posterity information supposed to be not inthe smallest danger of being ever either lost, or misconceived. Thus it hap-pened, that while the poet, the rhetorician, and the philosopher, endeavouredby their several labours to transmit to future ages such information or amuse-ment, as they could not by any other means make permanent beyond theirown lives ; the arts, with the means of cultivating them, were suffered toremain, as to their perfection, or advancement, almost without exception, inthe very precarious and uncertain existence, in the minds of those who culti-vated them.

It was sufficient for the historians to record the names, and the various actsof gallantry committed by their consuls and commanders, whether by sea orland, for they totally neglected those of the industrious persons who equippedthe fleets, or the mechanical principles on which they conducted their art,notwithstanding the state might be as much indebted, on the ground of assi-duity and ingenuity, to the individuals who manufactured the arms, as it wasto those who used them. From the distant countries which they over-ran,the conquerors carried nothing back with them to Italy but the spoils of thosewhom they plundered without remorse, and the empty glory of having ex-tended the limits of their empire. Those regions only, whose happy distancefrom that crater of the volcano, Rome, preserved them from experiencing the

dreadful