The Holbrook news., 1910-06-10
ANc1ENTs SURPASSED US
Tany Secrets They Possessed Are
 Lost to Modern Times.

Lost to Modern Times.
 Many secrets the ancients possessed
 Are lost to modern times and many
 things they did cannot be equaled to-
 day. Thousands of years ago the Egyptians used to embalm the bodies
 of their dead kings and nobility so
 perfectly that the bodies are in won-
 derful preservation to-day, as may be
 seen at the British museum. Clever as
 we are in this age, we cannot do the
 same. The valuable secret is lost, and modern science cannot recover the iost 1 knowledge. Bodies embalmed now adays will not be preserved for more thar few years at most; very many of the bodies of Egyptians embalIled before the birth of Christ are still so perfect that the lines of the faces are marked as clearly as when they were first embalmed.
 Sheffield turns out the finest, hard est and most perfect steel the world produces, but Sheffield cannot produce sword blade to compare with those the Saracens made and used hundreds of years ago, and the Saracens lever possessed the machinery we have, nor had the advantage of knowing so much about metals as we are supposed to know A huge fortune awaits the man who discovers the secret which enabled the Saracens to make sword blades so keen and hard that they would cut in two most of the swords used in our army to-day.
 There are a dozen different methods of making artificial diamonds, but none of the stones produced by these methods can compare with those made of old French paste, the secret of which is lost. So perfect were paste diamonds that it was difficult for even a person with expert knowledge of diamonds to tell that they were arti- ficially produced, whereas most of the modern artificial diamonds can be de- tected easily, and their durability is nothing like so great as the old paste diamond.
 Probably not one out of every ten thousand buildings standing in all parts of the world and built by modern masons will be standing 500 years hence We do not know how to put olOACo anu lOSCbACl eo SAAO oAA7 clients did, and consequently the build ing we raise nowadays will be in ruins when the ancient buildings in Greece and Italy, which were built thousands of years ago, are in as good condition as they are now. The secret is not in the bricks or stone, but in the cement and mortar, neither of which essen tials can we make as the ancients made them.
 Chemistry, one might imagine, is | the science which has made the great l est strides in the last five or six de cades. Yet modern chemists cannot | such dyes as were common ly used when the great nations of to- | day we're still unborn. Now and | again it happens that searchers after come across fragments of fabrics which were dyed thousands of years ago. and they are astonished by the wonderful richness of the colors of the cloths, which, despite their age, we can produce.
 Modern artists buy their celors ready made and spend large sums of money on pigments with which to color their canvasses. The pictures of modern artists will be colorless when many of the works of ancient masters are as bright as they are to-day. Just as the secret of dyeing has been lost. SO has the secret of preserving the col DTS of artists paints. Yet the secret was known to every ancient artist, for hey all mixed their own colors.