realize how slow and difficult the process was before the invention
of printing. The taste of the book-buying public demanded a clearly
written text, and in the Middle Ages it became customary to produce a
richly ornamented text as well. The script employed being the prototype
of the modern printed text, it will be obvious that a scribe could
produce but a few pages at best in a day. A large work would therefore
require the labor of a scribe for many months or even for several years.
We may assume, then, that it would be a very flourishing publisher who
could produce a hundred volumes all told per annum; and probably there
were not many publishers at any given time, even in the period of Rome's
greatest glory, who had anything like this output.

As there was a large number of authors in every generation of the
classical period, it follows that most of these authors must have been
obliged to content themselves with editions numbering very few copies;
and it goes without saying that the greater number of books were never
reproduced in what might be called a second edition. Even books that
retained their popularity for several generations would presently fail
to arouse sufficient interest to be copied; and in due course such works
would pass out of existence altogether. Doubtless many hundreds of books
were thus lost before the close of the classical period, the names of
their authors being quite forgotten, or preserved only through a chance
reference; and of course the work of elimination went on much more
rapidly during the Middle Ages, when the interest in classical
literature sank to so low an ebb in the West. Such collections of
references and quotations as the Greek Anthology and the famous
anthologies of Stobaeus and Athanasius and Eusebius give us glimpses
of a host of writers--more than seven hundred are quoted by Stobaeus--a
very large proportion of whom are quite unknown except through these
brief excerpts from their lost works.

Quite naturally the scientific works suffered at least as largely as
any others in an age given over to ecclesiastical dreamings. Yet in some
regards there is matter for surprise as to the works preserved. Thus, as
we have seen, the very extensive works of Aristotle on natural history,
and the equally extensive natural history of Pliny, which were preserved
throughout this period, and are still extant, make up relatively bulky
volumes. These works seem to have interested the monks of t