n, which nevertheless are themselves preserved and perpetuated
in literary tradition, as of the results of thought, and especially of
the discovery and of the production of technical means, which, once
found, are communicated and transmitted directly.

Need we remind the reader that writing was never lost, although the
peoples who invented it have disappeared from historic continuity? Need
we recall again that we all have in our pockets, engraved on our
watches, the Babylonian dial, and that we make use of algebra, which was
introduced by those Arabs, whose historical activity has since been
dispersed like the sands of the desert? It is useless to multiply these
examples, because it is sufficient to think of technology and the
history of discoveries in the broad sense of the word, for which the
almost continuous transmission of the instruments of labor and
production is evident.

And after all, the provisional summaries which are called universal
histories, although they always reveal, in their aim and in their
execution, something forced and artificial, would never have been
attempted if human events had not offered to the empiricism of the
narrators a certain thread, even though subtle, of continuity.

Take for example the Italy of the sixteenth century, which is evidently
in decadence; but while it is declining, it transmits to the rest of
Europe its intellectual weapons. These are not all that pass to the
civilization which continues, but even the world market establishes
itself upon the foundation of those geographical discoveries, and those
discoveries in the naval art, which were the work of Italian merchants,
travelers and sailors. It is not only the methods of the art of war and
the refinements of political diplomacy which passed outside of Italy
(though it is only with these that men of letters ordinarily concerned
themselves), but even the art of making money, which had acquired all
the evidence of an elaborate commercial discipline, and one after the
other the rudiments of the science, upon which is founded modern
technique, and to begin with all the methodical irrigation of fields and
the general laws of hydraulics. All that is so precisely true, that an
amateur in conjectural theses might come to the point of asking himself
this question: what would have become of Italy, in this modern bourgeois
epoch, if, executing the project of the Venetian Senate (1504) of making
something which would have resembled