followed by two books, one a mathematical book, the other on political
geography, and completed by a map--which one would like to see: but--
not a trace of all remains, save a few quoted fragments -


We are such stuff
As dreams are made of.


But if Eratosthenes had hold of eternal fact and law on one point, there
was a contemporary who had hold of it in more than one. I mean
Archimedes; of whom, as I have said, we must speak as of an Alexandrian.
It was as a mechanician, rather than as an astronomer, that he gained
his reputation. The stories of his Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship
which he built for Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane,
his war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical arrangement of mirrors,
by which he set fire to ships in the harbour--all these, like the story
of his detecting the alloy in Hiero's crown, while he himself was in the
bath, and running home undressed shouting [Greek text: eureeka]--all
these are schoolboys' tales. To the thoughtful person it is the method
of the man which constitutes his real greatness, that power of insight
by which he solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever and
of hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all static and
hydrostatic science to this day. And yet on that very question of the
lever the great mind of Aristotle babbles--neither sees the thing
itself, nor the way towards seeing it. But since Archimedes spoke, the
thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. There is something to me
very solemn in such a fact as this. It brings us down to some of the
very deepest questions of metaphysic. This mental insight of which we
boast so much, what is it? Is it altogether a process of our own brain