man, though
unfortunately that man is very often not the inventor. Had the
encouragement to industry been the same, the result would have been
the same. Articles of luxury were in high request, and of them the
supply was first-rate. But the demands of a luxurious nobility would
never have repaid any man for devoting his attention to the
improvement of mills or perfecting smith's work, and there was little
general commerce to set ingenuity at work. Italy imported largely both
agricultural produce and manufactures in the shape of tribute from a
conquered world, and probably exported part of her peculiar
productions; but we are not aware that there is any ground for
supposing that she manufactured goods for exportation to any extent.

Originally mills were turned by hand, (many establishments may still
be seen in the streets of Naples for grinding corn by means of a
hand-mill, turned by a man. Such flour-shops have always a picture of
the Madonna inside,) and this severe labor seems, in all half-savage
times, to have been conducted by women. It was so in Egypt; it was so
in Greece in the time of Homer, who employs fifty females in the house
of Alcinous upon this service. It was so in Palestine in the time of
the Evangelists, and in England in the fourteenth and sixteenth
centuries. We find a passage of St. Matthew thus rendered by Wicliffe:
"Two wymmen schulen (shall) be grinding in one querne," or hand-mill;
and Harrison the historian, two centuries later, says that his wife
ground her malt at home upon her quern. Among the Romans poor freemen
used sometimes to hire themselves out to the service of the mill when
all other resources failed; and Plautus is said to have done so, being
reduced to the extreme of poverty, and to have composed his comedies
while thus employed. This labor, however, fell chiefly upon slaves,
and is represented as being the severest drudgery which they had to
undergo. Those who had been guilty of any offense were sent to the
mill as a punishment, and sometimes forced to work in chains. Asses,
however, were used by those who could afford it. That useful animal
seems to have been employed in the establishment we are describing,
for the fragment of a jaw-bone, with several teeth in it, was found in
a room which seems to have been the stable; and the floor about the
mill is paved with rough pieces of stone, while in the rest of the
rooms it is made of stucco or compost. The use of water-mills,
however