matters. In the Dark Ages to use their traditional name, 
     there was little assured leisure for pursuit of the niceties 
     of literature, art, philosophy, and theoretical science, but 
     many people nevertheless addressed their perfectly good 
     minds to social, agricultural, and mechanical problems. 
     Moreover, all through those academically debased 
     centuries, so far from there having been any falling off in 
     mechanical ability, there was an unbroken series of 
     discoveries and inventions that gave the Dark Ages, and 
     after them the Middle Ages, a technology, and, therefore, 
     a logic, that in many most important respects far 
     surpassed anything that had been known to the Greeks 
     or to the Romans of the Western Empire.

     His theme is that “the Dark and Middle Ages in their 
poverty and necessity produced the first great crop of Yankee