Let us further remember, that during this same period there was a limited knowledge of chemistry.  The many arts which we know to have been carried on must have been impossible without a generalised experience of the modes in which certain bodies affect each other under special conditions.  In metallurgy, which was extensively practised, this is abundantly illustrated.  And we even have evidence that in some cases the knowledge possessed was, in a sense, quantitative.  For, as we find by analysis that the hard alloy of which the Egyptians made their cutting tools, was composed of copper and tin in fixed proportions, there must have been an established prevision that such an alloy was to be obtained only by mixing them in these proportions.  It is true, this was but a simple empirical generalisation; but so was the generalisation respecting the recurrence of eclipses; so are the first generalisations of every science.

Respecting the simultaneous advance of the sciences during this early epoch, it only remains to remark that even the most complex of them must have made some progress—­perhaps even a greater relative progress than any of the rest.  For under what conditions only were the foregoing developments possible?  There first required an established and organised social system.  A long continued registry of eclipses; the building of palaces; the use of scales; the practice of metallurgy—­alike imply a fixed and populous nation.  The existence of such a nation not only presupposes laws, and some administration of justice, which we know existed, but it presupposes successful laws—­laws conforming in some degree to the conditions of social stability—­laws enacted because it was seen that the actions forbidden by them were dangerous to the State.  We do not by any means say that all, or even the greater part, of the laws were of this nature; but we do say, that the fundamental ones were.  It cannot be denied that the laws affecting life and property were such.  It cannot be denied that, however little these were enforced between class and class, they were to a considerable extent enforced between members of the same class.  It can scarcely be questioned, that the administration of them between members of the same class was seen by rulers to be necessary for keeping their subjects together.  And knowing, as we do, that, other things equal, nations prosper in proportion to the justness of their arrangements, we may fairly infer that the very cause of the advance of these earliest nations out of aboriginal barbarism was the greater recognition among them of the claims to life and property.