spear-heads for the men-at-arms. "More important than all, they forged the mail-coats and cuirasses of the chiefs, and welded their swords, on the temper and quality of which life, honour, and victory in battle depended." There is small wonder then that in Anglo-Saxon times the person of the smith was protected by a double penalty. He was treated as an officer of the highest rank, and awarded the first place in precedency. After him ranked the maker of mead, and then came the physician. In the royal court of Wales he sat in the great hall with the King and Queen, next to the domestic chaplain.
A story is told of a Highland clan whose smith committed some act of robbery on a neighbouring clan, for which his execution was demanded. The chief, however, explained that he could not afford to dispense with the smith, but he generously offered to hang two weavers in his stead.
But the art of the smith, in those days and for long afterwards, was purely empirical. It could be successfully learned and practised by men who could neither read nor write. It had no basis of scientific knowledge. With the growth of requirements due to the development of large towns, some members of the great Smith family became manufacturers, as at Sheffield and Birmingham; others enlarged the. scope of their activities to include more of what we now understand by engineering work. Masons became bridge builders. But the fountains of science, from which the young engineering giant was to be nourished, were as yet unknown at the time when the first Universities were established. At the University of Paris the four faculties were Theology, Law, Medicine, and Philosophy, which were represented as the four streams of learning that were like unto the rivers of Paradise. But in this Paradise science had no part, and of practical applications of science there could be none. A well-known
