that architecture called Gothic.  The Goths and barbarians who overran Italy had not any characteristic architecture, good or bad.  They brought with them neither architects, painters, nor poets.  They were all soldiers, and when fixed in Italy employed Italian artists; but as in that country, good taste was much on the decline, it now became more debased, notwithstanding the efforts made by the Goths to revive it.”

ARCHIMEDES.

This wonderful genius was of royal descent, and born at Syracuse about B.C. 287.  He was a relative of king Hiero, who held him in the highest esteem and favor, though he does not appear to have held any public office, preferring to devote himself entirely to science.  Such was his enthusiasm, that he appears at times to have been so completely absorbed in contemplation and calculations, as to be totally unconscious of what was passing around him.  We cannot fully estimate his services to mathematics, for want of an acquaintance with the previous state of science; still we know that he enriched it with discoveries of the highest importance, upon which the moderns have founded their admeasurements of curvilinear surfaces and solids.  Euclid, in his elements, considers only the relations of some of these magnitudes to each other, but does not compare them with surfaces and solids bounded by straight lines.  Archimedes developed the proportions necessary for effecting this comparison, in his treatises on the sphere and cylinder, the spheroid and conoid, and in his work on the measure of the circle.  He rose to still more abstruse considerations in his treatise on the spiral.  Archimedes is also the only one of the ancients who has left us anything satisfactory on the theory of mechanics and hydrostatics.  He first taught the principle “that a body immersed in a fluid, loses as much in weight, as the weight of an equal volume of the fluid.”  He discovered this while bathing, which is said to have caused him so much joy that he ran home from the bath undressed, exclaiming, “I have found it; I have found it!” By means of this principle, he determined how much alloy a goldsmith had added to a crown which king Hiero had ordered of pure gold.  Archimedes had a profound knowledge of mechanics, and in a moment of enthusiasm, with which the extraordinary performances of his machines had inspired him, he exclaimed that he “could move the earth with ease, by means of his machines placed on a fixed point near it.”  He was the inventor of the compound pulley, and probably of the endless screw which bears his name.  He invented many surprising engines and machines.  Some suppose that he visited Egypt, and raised the sites of the towns and villages of Egypt, and begun those mounds of earth by means of which communication was kept up from town to town, during the inundations of the Nile.  When Marcellus, the Roman consul, besieged Syracuse, he devoted all his talents to the defense