“You are happy, Abgar, thus to have believed in me without having seen
me; for it is written of me, that they who shall see me will not believe
in me, and that they who have never seen me shall believe and be saved.
As to the desire you express in receiving a visit from me, I must tell
you that all things for which I am come must be fulfilled in the country
where I am. When this is done, I must return to Him who sent me. And
when I am departed hence, I will send to you one of my disciples, who
will cure you of the disease of which you complain, and give life to you
and to those that are with you.”
Valuable Secrets Lost to Men.
Fame and Fortune Await Those Who Rescue from Oblivion’s Great
Storage-House Bits of Knowledge That Enabled Old-Time Workmen to Obtain
Results That Cannot be Duplicated To-day.
The nineteenth century was distinctively a century of invention. Whether
the twentieth is destined to rival it by making discoveries that will
rank with steam, electricity, wireless telegraphy, the harvester and the
typewriter it is now too soon to say. It is safe to predict, however,
that if by any series of fortunate chances it should earn the right to
be called a “century of rediscovery,” it would win the gratitude of
posterity, and fortune as well as fame would be the portion of men who
might reclaim for mankind some remarkable secrets that were well known
to the civilized world many centuries ago.
In Oblivion’s great storage-house are thousands of bits of knowledge
which were possessed by many men when the world was much younger than it
is to-day. But they have been so thoroughly forgotten by mankind that
they are now referred to as lost secrets, as difficult to rediscover as
those which lurk in the mystical notes of a Stradivarius violin.
Art of Egyptian Embalmers.
Thousands of years ago, for instance, the Egyptians used to embalm the
bodies of their dead kings and nobility so perfectly that the bodies
are in wonderful 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 lost
knowledge. We can, of course, and we do, embalm bodies; but only for
temporary preservation, and, comparatively speaking, in a most
unsatisfactory manner.
Bodies which are embalmed nowadays will not be preserved for more than
a few years at most; very many of the bodies the Egyptians embalmed
before the birth of Christ are still so perfect that the lines of
their faces are as clearly marked as when they were first embalmed.
Sheffield turns out the finest, hardest, and most perfect steel the
world produces; but even Sheffield cannot produce a sword-blade to
compare with those the Saracens made and used hundreds of years ago,
and the Saracens never 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 could cut
in two most of the swords used in our army to-day.
French Paste Diamonds.
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 artificially produced,
whereas most of the modern artificial diamonds can easily be detected,
and their durability is nothing like so great as the old paste
diamonds; indeed, good paste diamonds are now almost as valuable as
real diamonds.
Probably not one out of every ten thousand buildings standing in all
parts of the world and built by modern masons will still be standing
five hundred years hence. We do not know how to put stones and bricks
together as the ancients did, and consequently the buildings we raise
nowadays are really mere temporary structures, and will be in ruins
when the ancient buildings of 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 the stone, but in the cement and
mortar, neither of which essentials can we make as the ancients made
them.
In modern buildings the cement and mortar are the weakest points; in
the buildings which the Romans and Greeks raised thousands of years
ago the cement and mortar are the strongest points, and hold good
while the very stones they bind together crumble away with age. We
cannot, with all our science, make such cement and mortar, and
therefore we cannot build such buildings as the ancients raised.
Wonderful Ancient Dyes.
Chemistry, one might Imagine, is the science which has, perhaps, made
the greatest strides during the last five or six decades. Yet modern
chemists cannot compound such dyes as were commonly used when the
great nations of to-day were still unborn. Now and again it happens
that searchers after antiquities 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, are brighter and purer than anything we can produce.
Modern artists buy their colors ready made, and spend large sums of
money on pigments with which to color their canvases. 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 colors of artists’
paints. Yet the secret was known to every ancient artist, for they all
mixed their own colors.
Formula for Durable Ink.
How to make durable ink Is another great secret we have lost. Look at
any letter five or ten years old and you will probably notice that the
writing has faded to a brown color and is very indistinct. Go to any
big museum, and you will find ancient manuscripts, the writing of
which is as black and distinct as if the manuscript were written the
day before yesterday.
The secret of glass blowing and tinting is not yet entirely lost;
there are still a few men who can produce glass-work equal to that
which the ancients turned out hundreds of years ago.
But the average glass manufacturer cannot produce anything that could
at all compare with some of the commoner articles the Egyptians, and,
later, the founders of Venice manufactured; and those who still hold
the ancient secret guard it so closely that it will probably die with
them and be added to the long list of things in which our ancestors
beat us hollow.