No nation has ever been without proverbs. These little groups of words consist of the wisdom of our ancestors tersely expressed, and they are examples of brief sayings which pleased the men of former generations on account of some well-spoken trath or sparkling antithesis or striking eimilitude. Pro-past through many by-gone years, The Greeks first gathered them into books from a feeling that they were deserving of a place in literature, and they were thought more of because Aristotle said of them that they are remnants of ancient philosophy, preserved amid very many destractions on account of their brevity and fitness for use. The Greek conception of proverb was very much a similitude, and they perhaps derived this idea from their Semitic neighbours. The Hebrew word mashal at least means a similitude, and the Greek paroimia a wayside remark, But the force of a proverb is not what it seems to say, but in its application, as is the case also with every fable of Alsop, each of which is an expanded proverb, The senso of a proverb corresponds to the moral of a fable, Promare translates the Chinese proverb tui niu erh than chun "to play the harp to oxen" by the words sinus adlyram, Another proverb k'uat
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.