before me from one of your President's* grand piano fortes in this, to that amazing combination of ropes and wheels. and pulleys, by means of which, with a slight motion of his hand at the end of a machine which he had contrived for the purpose, he is said to have drawn towards himself, from a considerable distance and upon the dry land, one of the largest of the King's galleys, fully manned and fully laden, in as smooth and gentle a manner as if she had been under sail upon the sea!

It was this last achievement which induced the astonished Hiero to intercede with the philosopher to prepare for him a number of engines and machines which might be used either for attack or defence in case of a siege. Hiero, it seems, thus early adopted the prudent maxim of our own Washington, "In peace, prepare for war." Like Washington, however, he maintained always a pacific and paternal policy, and he finished a reign of almost unequaled duration, without having been obliged to resort to the marvelous enginery with which Archimedes was prevailed upon to provide him.

But the time at length came round, when Syracuse was to need that enginery; and fortunately the old engineer was himself alive and at hand, to superintend and direct its application.

Old Hiero died at ninety years of age, after a reign of fifty-four years. He had made peace with the Romans and become their ally, soon after his accession, and he resolutely adhered to them until his death. His son Gelon had died before him, and he was, therefore, succeeded on the throne by his grandson, Hieronymus, a boy of fifteen years of age, who was flattered and seduced by the emissaries of Hannibal into an alliance

* A few days only after the delivery of this Lecture, the excellent President of the Association, JONAS CHICKERING, Esq., was struck down by apoplexy and died. The remembrance of his virtues and his charities will be long and gratefully cherished by our whole community.

He was soon after basely

with the Carthaginians. assassinated by a band of conspirators in the Roman interest, and with him the whole race of Hiero was exterminated. A reaction in favor of the Carthaginian alliance having been the natural consequence of this atrocious massacre, Syracuse at once became a prey to foreign influences and entanglements, and suffered all the evils of a city divided against itself. A Roman fleet was accordingly despatched to turn the scale between the contending factions, and Marcellus was sent over to Sicily to assume the supreme command. But the recent cruelty and barbarity of Marcellus in scourging and beheading, in cold blood, two thousand of the Roman deserters at the siege of Leontini, had roused up all the friends of Rome in Syracuse against him, and they absolutely refused to acknowledge his authority, or even to admit him into the city.

Thence arose that last and most famous siege of Syracuse, a siege carried on both by land and sea,-Marcellus commanding the fleet, and Appius Claudius the army. The Roman army was large and powerful, invincible and irresistible, as it was supposed, by any force which Syracuse could furnish, whether Carthaginian or Sicilian. It was flushed, too, by recent victory, being fresh from storming the walls of Leontini, which it had accomplished as easily-(to borrow Dr. Arnold's Homeric comparison)"as easily as a child tramples out the towers and castles which he has scratched upon the sand of the sea-shore."

"But at Syracuse, (continues this admirable historian and excellent man, whose description could not be mended,) it was checked by an artillery such as the Romans had never encountered before, and which, had Hannibal possessed it, would long since have enabled him to bring the war to a triumphant issue. An old man of seventy-four, a relation and friend of King Hiero, long

known as one of the ablest astronomers and mathematicians of his age, now proved that his science was no less practical than deep; and amid all the crimes and violence of contending factions, he alone won the pure glory of defending his country successfully against a foreign enemy. This old man was Archimedes.

"Many years before, he had contrived the engines which were now used so effectively. Marcellus brought up his ships against the sea-wall of Achradina, and endeavored by a constant discharge of stones and arrows to clear the walls of their defenders, so that his men might apply their ladders, and mount to the assault. These ladders rested on two ships lashed together, broadside to broadside, and worked as one by their outside oars; and when the two ships were brought close up under the wall, one end of the ladder was raised by ropes passing through blocks affixed to the two mastheads of the two vessels, and was then let go, till it rested on the top of the wall. But Archimedes had supplied the ramparts with an artillery so powerful that it overwhelmed the Romans before they could get within the range which their missiles. could reach; and when they came closer, they found all the lower part of the wall was loopholed; and their men were struck down with fatal aim by an enemy they could not see, and who shot his arrows in perfect security. If they still persevered and attempted to fix their ladders, on a sudden they saw long poles thrust out from the top of the wall like the arms of a giant; and enormous stones, or huge masses of lead, were dropped upon them, by which their ladders were crushed to pieces, and their ships were almost sunk. At other times, machines like cranes, or such as are used at the turnpikes in Germany, and in the market gardens round London, to draw water, were thrust out over the wall; and the end of the lever, with an iron grapple affixed to it, was lowered upon the Roman ships. As soon as the grapple had taken hold,

the other end of the lever was lowered by heavy weights, and the ship raised out of water, till it was made almost to stand upon its stern; then the grapple was suddenly let go, and the ship dropped into the sea with a violence which either upset it or filled it with water. With equal power was the assault on the landside repelled; and the Roman soldiers, bold as they were, were so daunted by these strange and irresistible devices, that if they saw so much as a rope or a stick hanging or projecting from the wall, they would turn about and run away, crying, 'that Archimedes was going to set one of his engines at work against them.' Their attempts, indeed, were a mere amusement to the enemy, till Marcellus in despair put a stop to his attacks; and it was resolved merely to blockade the town, and to wait for the effect of famine upon the crowded population within."*

Plutarch represents Marcellus, in this strait, as laughing outright at his own artillerymen and engineers, and as exclaiming, "Why do we not leave off contending with this mathematical Briareus, who, sitting on the shore, and acting as it were but in jest, has shamefully baffled our naval assault; and in striking us with such a multitude of bolts at once, exceeds even the hundred-handed giants in the fable?" And, in truth, (adds the old Greek biographer,) all the rest of the Syracusans were no more than the body in the batteries of Archimedes, while he himself was the informing soul. All other weapons lay idle and unemployed; his were the only offensive and

defensive arms of the city.

That, Mr. President, was the application of science to art with a witness to it, and in the noblest of all causes, the defence of one's country. That was an illustration of the one man power which has never been surpassed, if ever equaled, since the world began. I know of few

*Arnold's History of Rome, vol. iii. chap. 45.

things, certainly, more sublime, in the history of human actions, than the spectacle of this old patriot mathematician and mechanic holding Marcellus and the Roman power at bay by his single arm, and saving his native. city so long by his unaided and overwhelming genius. It reminds one of nothing so much as of Milton's magnificent description of the heroic, renowned, irresistible Samson, as he calls him in the Agonistes, who

"Ran on embattled armies clad in iron;

And, weaponless himself,

Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery

Of brazen shield and spear, the hammered cuirass,
Chalibean-tempered steel, and frock of mail
Adamantean proof.

But safest he who stood aloof,

When insupportably his foot advanced,

In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools,

Spurned them to death by troops. The bold Ascalonite
Fled from his lion ramp; old warriors turned

Their plated backs under his heel;

Or, groveling, soiled their crested helmets in the dust."

Samson's, however, you all remember, was mere physical strength, mere brute force, which, though it could defy a thousand swords and spears, yielded ingloriously at last to a single pair of scissors; while that of Archimedes was the surpassing and almost superhuman power of intellect, overcoming all physical forces, and rendering them subservient and tributary to its own mighty will.

And now, who can remember this incomparable service which Archimedes rendered to his native city in the hour of its utmost peril, and then reflect upon the oblivion into which his tomb and almost his name seem so soon to have fallen,—even among the magistrates of Syracuse in Cicero's time, without recalling that touching lesson upon human vanity and human ingratitude which has been left us by the Royal Preacher on the pages of Holy Writ? One would almost imagine that Solomon was a