th other nations of antiquity, it is absolutely necessary
that we should pay some attention to the history of Babylon, Nineveh,
Phoenicia, and Persia. These may seem distant countries and
forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say, "Let the dead
bury their dead; what are those mummies to us?" Still, such is the
marvellous continuity of history, that I could easily show you many
things which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to Babylon, to
Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia.

Every one who carries a watch owes to the Babylonians the division of
the hour into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such
as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to
them from Babylon. The sexagesimal division is peculiarly Babylonian.
Hipparchos, 150 B.C., adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 A.D., gave
it wider currency, and the French, when they decimated everything
else, respected the dial-plates of our watches, and left them with
their sixty Babylonian minutes.

Every one who writes a letter owes his alphabet to the Romans and
Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the
Phoenicians learned it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect
alphabet--as all the students of phonetics will tell you--yet, such as
it is and has been, we owe it to the old Phoenicians and Egyptians,
and in every letter we trace, there lies imbedded the mummy of an
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.

What do we owe to the Persians? It does not seem to be much, for they
were not a very inventive race, and what they knew they had chiefly
learned from their neighbors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still,
we owe them something. First of all, we owe them a large debt of
gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks;
for think what the world would have been if the Persians had beaten
the Greeks at Marathon, and had enslaved--that means, annihilated--the
genius of ancient Greece. However, this may be called rather an
involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity, and I mention it
only in order to show how narrowly, not only Greeks and Romans, but
Saxons and Anglo-Saxons too, escaped becoming Parsis or
Fire-worshippers.

But I can mention at least one voluntary gift which came to us from
Persia, and that is the relation of silver to gold in our bi-metallic
currency. That relation was, no doubt, first determined in Babylonia,
but it assumed its practical and historical