It seems to have been discovered too late, however, that Sicily had no harbor large enough for the permanent accommodation of this stupendous structure,—although Syracuse itself was famous for its capacious port, in which, even as late as the year 1798, ages after it had been supposed to be irrecoverably choked up with sand, the heroic Nelson, on his way to the glories of the Nile, found a safe and ample anchorage for a whole fleet of British frigates and ships of war,-watering his ships, in the meantime, at the fountain of Arethusa, and writing to a friend that that alone was an ample recipe for victory. At any rate, on this account or some other, this huge vessel was sent off as a present to Ptolemy, King of Egypt, laden with corn enough to supply almost the whole demand of an immediate national scarcity. Now, one of the Ptolemies is said to have had a ship (280 cubits) 420 feet long, and (48 cubits) 72 feet deep, which is nearly 100 feet longer and 33 feet deeper than the Great Republic, and which required four thousand four hundred rowers and other mariners, and was capable of accommodating three thousand soldiers besides—a ship which the great historian Gibbon, in one of his notes, quotes Dr. Arbuthnot as having estimated at four and a half times the tonnage of an English hundred-gun ship! If the ship which Archimedes built was larger and more capacious still, as, under the circumstances, must be presumed, he may fairly be set down as having outdone even the foremost and most adventurous of our East Boston shipbuilders, in the construction of these monsters of the deep; notwithstanding the recent suggestion that Donald McKay can be nothing less than a lineal descendant of the great Ark-builder, father Noah himself.

It must be remembered, however, that there was no ocean navigation in those days to try the strength of her hull, or test the stiffness of her ribs, and that rowing her across the Mediterranean was a very different thing

from giving her to the breeze upon the broad Atlantic. Even for the short voyages of that day, the charming Roman Lyric tells us that there was no great confidence to be placed in these painted and ornamented ships; and I imagine there is very little doubt which of the two vessels any of us would prefer for a voyage to Canton or San Francisco, or even for a trip to Dover. It must not be forgotten, either, that the Sicilian ship did not obey the magic voice of its master builder, as the Great Republic did in the sight of us all in her late majestic and sublime descent into her destined element, with all her bravery on and streamers waving ;—but required, we are told, the aid of a powerful and ponderous screw, which Archimedes was obliged to invent, and did invent, for the express purpose of launching her.

But this was not the only screw which Archimedes invented. You are all acquainted with another which bears his name to this day, which, I believe, is often called the water-snail,-and which is sometimes said to have been originally contrived for pumping water out of the hold of this same gigantic ship, and by others as having been invented by him, while in Egypt, for raising the waters of the Nile to irrigate the lands which were above the reach of the river.

It would occupy too much of my time to enter into any detailed account or enumeration of all the inventions which are ascribed to this wonderful man. Nothing seems to have been above or below the reach of his inventive faculties, from a Chinese puzzle to exercise the ingenuity of children, to an orrery illustrating the movements of the heavenly orbs. Nothing seems to have been too difficult for his accomplishment, from an hydraulic organ,-producing music, I dare say, almost as delightful in that day, as can be drawn by any of the fair fingers

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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.

with the Carthaginians. He was soon after basely 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.

army.

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 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,