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639 Vico, 639 no reason to believe that there is any inherent principle of decay in states, against which wisdom and virtue would contend in vain. Without entering further into the merits of the Scienza Nuova, as a Philosophy of History, I shall point out some of those remarkable anticipations of subsequent discoveries which are to be found in it. The first of these is the opinion that the hieroglyphic characters were not an inven- tion of the priests or philosophers of Egypt, to conceal a sublime doctrine from the knowledge of the vulgar, or keep them in subjection by maintaining a monopoly of science. Warburton in his Divine Legation, B. iv. Sect. 4, speaks of this as being in his time an universal mistake, and his ex- posure of it, by deducing hieroglyphics from picture writing, and showing the analogy between these modes of writing and the figurative and dramatic speech of early times, is one of the most valuable parts of that now nearly forgotten work. It is curious, that both Vico and Warburton quote the story of Idanthyrsus, the king of Scythia, who sent to Darius e^ mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows, to intimate a threat of destruction, as an example of a kind of material hiero- glyphic^ and a proof that the principle was widely diffused. According to Vico the symbolical character of the Egyptians succeeded to the hieroglyphic, and answered to the orfj/uaTa which Homer mentions in the story of Bellerophon, and the epistolographic was an alphabet. He had observed the simi- larity of the epistolographic character of the Egyptians with the alphabet of the Phoenicians, but supposed the latter nation to have been the inventors. A still more remarkable coincidence is that which appears between the opinions of Vico on Homer, and those which have made the name of F. A. Wolf so celebrated. The third book of the Scienza Nuova is entitled '^ Discovery of the real Homer." After showing with how little reason the cha- racter of a philosopher had been attributed to him, he proceeds to inquire, whether the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey were the same, and decides the question in the negative, on the ground that a poet whose native country was Asia Minor, where the author of the Iliad was evidently born, could not have spoken of Euboea, as the author of the Odyssey does,