Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
But these figures are trifling compared with those at the end of the middle ages.
Although iron, copper, coal and lignite are worked, the mineral wealth is trifling.
Marey repeats Borelli and Diirckheim with very trifling modifications, so late as 1869.
The truth is that we possess but a trifling portion of a very much larger Avesta, if we are to believe native tradition, carrying us back to the Sassanian period, which tells of a larger Avesta in twenty-one books called nasks or nosks, as to the names of which we have several more or less detailed accounts, particularly in the Pahlavi Dinkard (9th century A.D.) and in the Rivayats.
