FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION
to examine the former, to analyse their qualities, and especially to follow them back to their origins. By this method I convinced myself at last that everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting-point, is the development of a single germ and the result of a single thought ; it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe.
