discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day

laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and

ill-treated them, or was seized withfear and made saints and

sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and

entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them

not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first

dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his

blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,

was the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court

of Sforza in Milan in astate of dignified abstraction. His

common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious

anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his

parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his

kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of

Alexandria, whoknew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years

before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was

Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus

of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there

was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.

And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might

have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive

engine. But they couldsee nothing of the sort. They were not

yet beginning tothink ofseeing things; their metallurgy was all

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