little sorry that either their estates have not been
longer, or your leisure more; for, in my simple
judgment, there was such an orderly government
that men may not be ashamed to imitate it."
J. Lilly, Euphues (1581).
(The romances of Calprenéde and Scudéri bear the same relation to the jargon of Louis XIV., as the Euphues of Lilly to that of Queen Elizabeth.)
Eure'ka! or rather HEUKE'KA! ("I have discovered it!") The exclamation of Archime'des, the Syracusan philosopher, when he found out how to test the purity of Hi'ero's crown.
The tale is, that Hiero suspected that a craftsman to whom he had given a certain weight of gold to make into a crown had alloyed the metal, and he asked Archimedês to ascertain if his suspicion was well founded. The philosopher, getting into his bath, observed that the water ran over, and it flashed into his mind that his body displaced its own bulk of water. Now, suppose Hiero gave the goldsmith 1 lb. of gold, and the crown weighed 1 lb., it is manifest that if the crown was pure gold, both ought to displace the same quantity of water; but they did not do so, and therefore the gold had been tampered with. Archimedes next immersed in water 1 lb. of silver, and the difference of water displaced soon gave the clue to the amount of alloy introduced by the artificer.
Vitruvius says: "When the idea occurred to
the philosopher, he jumped out of his bath, and