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The first case produced a complete chemical cutting unit, with an assortment of cutting tips and adapters. Rip looked around for the gas cylinders and saw none. "Something's wrong," he objected. "Where's the fuel supply for the torch?" The supply clerk inspected the lists, shuffled papers, and found the answer. "The following," he read, "are to be supplied from the Scorpius complement.
"As for the first harp," snapped Adam Craig, nettled, "there's a Grecian lyre tale yonder on the shelf like it." "Liar tale," said Kenny purposely misunderstanding. Hum! The Greeks, he remembered regretfully, were clever adapters. His air of assurance incensed the old man. "As for that fool of a Cuchullin," he rasped, coughing a little, "where is he different from Achilles?"
But they were not possessed of any great genius or originality. They were, on the whole, adapters rather than inventors. They owed their idea of alphabetic writing to the Accadians, their weights and measures to Babylon, their shipbuilding probably to Egypt, their early architecture to the same country, their mimetic art to Assyria, to Egypt, and to Greece.
Beaumont and Fletcher who were themselves among the cleverest adapters of the times and the rest of that glorious monument to human credulity and memorial to an impossible, wholly apocryphal genius, known as the works of William Shakespeare.
Often enough, indeed, the names of great inventors and projectors have been overshadowed or effaced by mere finishers of their work or adapters of their idea, who have reaped the honor and emolument due to an obscure originator, who passes away from the world, his rightful claim to its admiration and gratitude unknown or unacknowledged.
It may be suggested that Shakespeare was one of the most persistent of adapters. He may very well be left out of the question.
If what we believe to be civilisation is to be developed in China, it will be developed by the Chinese themselves. If they are going to possess railways, telegraphs, telephones, and all the machinery of that material advancement which we call progress, and sometimes civilisation, the Chinese themselves will be the importers and adapters and, in due course, the manufacturers thereof.
These instances show that the faculty of original thought is not entirely lacking among the Japanese. Under favorable conditions, such as now prevail, there is good reason for holding that the Japanese will take their place among the peoples of the world, not only as skillful imitators and adapters, but also as original contributors to the progress of civilization and of science.
Everything, in short, is transfused by the spirit of the adapters' own times; and so far are these writers from any weakly sense of anachronism in describing Troy as if it were a moated and turreted city of the later Middle Ages, that they are only careful now and then to protest their own truthfulness when anything in their narrative seems UNLIKE the days in which they write.
So extreme are the positions of some, so evidently tinctured with overreadiness for criticism and unbelief, that they must be excluded from the "most" above described. I speak of the Germans because they, chiefly, are those capable and active in original research. Most of our American "advanced critics" are merely translators and adapters of German work.
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