After the flight of untold centuries, Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth 7. There have been holy men, who hid themselves Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave 8. Their lives to thought, and prayer, till they outlived The generation born with them, nor seemed Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks Around them; and there have been holy men, Retire, and, in thy presence, reassure The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink, O God! when thou Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire The swift, dark whirlwind, that uproots the woods, And drowns the villages; when, at thy call, Of the mad, unchained elements, to teach LESSON CII. ARCHIMEDES. WINTHROP. 1. ARCHIMEDES was born in the year 287 before the christian era, in the island of Sicily, and city of Syracuse. Of his childhood and early education we know absolutely nothing, and nothing of his family, save that he is stated to have been one of the poor relations of King Hiero, who came to the throne when Archimedes was quite a young man, and of whose royal patronage he more than repaid whatever measure he may have enjoyed. There is no more characteristic anecdote of this great philosopher than that relating to his detection of a fraud in the composition of the royal crown. Nothing, certainly, could more vividly illustrate the ingenuity, the enthusiasm, and the complete concentration and abstraction of mind, with which he pursued whatever problem was proposed to him. 2. King Hiero, or his son Gelon, it seems, had given out a certain amount of gold to be made into a crown, and the workman to whom it had been intrusted had at last brought back a crown of corresponding weight. But a suspicion arose that it had been alloyed with silver, and Archimedes was applied to by the king, either to disprove or to verify the allegation. The great problem, of course, was to ascertain the precise bulk of the crown in its existing form; for, gold being so much heavier than silver, it is obvious that if the weight had been in any de gree made up by the substitution of silver, the bulk would be proportionately increased. Now, it happened that Archimedes went to take a bath while this problem was exercising his mind, and, on approaching the bath tub, he found it full to the very brim. It instantly occurred to him that a quantity of water of the same bulk with his own body must be displaced before his body could be immersed. 3. Accordingly, he plunged in; and while the process of displacement was going on, and the water was running out, the idea suggested itself to him, that by putting a lump of gold of the exact weight of the crown into a vessel full of water, and then measuring the water which was displaced by it, and by afterward putting the crown itself into the same vessel after it had again been filled, and then measuring the water which this, too, should have displaced, the difference in their respective bulks, however minute, would be at once detected, and the fraud exposed. "As soon as he had hit upon this method of detection," we are told, “he did not wait a moment, but jumped joyfully out of the bath, and, running naked toward his own house, called out with a loud voice, that he had found what he had sought. For, as he ran, he called out in Greek, “Eureka, Eureka!" 66 4. No wonder that this veteran geometer, rushing through the thronged and splendid streets of Syracuse, naked as a pair of his own compasses, and making the welkin ring with his triumphant shouts-no wonder that he should have rendered the phrase, if not the guise, in which he announced his success, familiar to all the world, and that " Eureka, Eureka," should thus have become the proverbial ejaculation of successful invention and discovery in all ages, and in all languages, from that day to this! The solution of this problem is supposed to have led the old philosopher not merely into this ecstatical exhibition of himself, but into that line of hydrostatical investigation and experiment which afterward secured him such lasting renown And thus the accidents of a defective crown and an overflowing bath-tub gave occasion to some of the most remarkable demonstrations of ancient science. LESSON CIII. PARRHASIUS AND THE CAPTIVE. WILLIS. "PARRHASIUS, & painter of Athens, amongst those Olynthian captives Philip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man; and when he had him at his house, put him to death with extreme torture and torment, the better, by his example, to express the pain and passions of his Prometheus, whom he was then about to paint."-Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 1. THERE stood an unsold captive in the mart, 3. The golden light into the painter's room 4. 5. 6. 7. Upon his canvas. There Prometheus lay Were like the winged god's, breathing from his flight. "Bring me the captive now! My hands feel skillful, and the shadows lift Upon the bended heavens; around me play "Ha! bind him on his back! Look! as Prometheus in my picture here! Quick! or he faints! stand with the cordial near! Press down the poisoned links into his flesh! "So, let him writhe! How long Will he live thus? Quick, my good pencil, now! What a fine agony works upon his brow! Ha! gray-haired, and so strong! How fearfully he stifles that short moan ! "Pity' thee! So I do! I pity the dumb victim at the altar, But does the rob'd priest for his pity falter? |