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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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