Limousin for
forming certain geniuses. Further, it is possible that the government of
Athens, by seconding the climate, put into Demosthenes' head something
that the air of Climart and La Grenouillere and the government of
Cardinal de Richelieu did not put into the heads of Omer Talon and
Jerome Bignon.

This dispute is therefore a question of fact. Was antiquity more fecund
in great monuments of all kinds, up to the time of Plutarch, than modern
centuries have been from the century of the Medicis up to Louis XIV.
inclusive?

The Chinese, more than two hundred years before our era, constructed
that great wall which was not able to save them from the invasion of the
Tartars. The Egyptians, three thousand years before, had overloaded the
earth with their astonishing pyramids, which had a base of about ninety
thousand square feet. Nobody doubts that, if one wished to undertake
to-day these useless works, one could easily succeed by a lavish
expenditure of money. The great wall of China is a monument to fear; the
pyramids are monuments to vanity and superstition. Both bear witness to
a great patience in the peoples, but to no superior genius. Neither the
Chinese nor the Egyptians would have been able to make even a statue
such as those which our sculptors form to-day.

The chevalier Temple, who has made it his business to disparage all the
moderns, claims that in architecture they have nothing comparable to the
temples of Greece and Rome: but, for all that he is English, he must
agree that the Church of St. Peter is incomparably more beautiful than
the Capitol was.

It is curious with what assurance he maintains that there is nothing new
in our astronomy, nothing in the knowledge of the human body, unless
perhaps, he says, the circulation of the blood. Love of his own opinion,
founded on his vast self-esteem, makes him forget the discovery of the
satellites of Jupiter, of the five moons and the ring of Saturn, of the
rotation of the sun on its axis, of the calculated position of three
thousand stars, of the laws given by Kepler and Newton for the heavenly
orbs, of the causes of the precession of the equinoxes, and of a hundred
other pieces of knowledge of which the ancients did not suspect even the
possibility.

The discoveries in anatomy are as great in number. A new universe in
little, discovered by the microscope, was counted for nothing by the
chevalier Temple; he closed his eyes to the marvels of his
contempora