But the surviving material is extremely uneven; vital events in these centuries are treated with a slightness in striking contrast to the relatively detailed evidence for the preceding period - evidence, however, which is far from being contemporary.
The great fluidity of bronze when melted, the slightness of its contraction on solidifying, together with its density and hardness, make it especially suitable for casting, and allow of its taking the impress of the mould with extreme sharpness and delicacy.
Portuguese literature is distinguished by the wealth and variety of its lyric poetry, by its primacy in bucolic verse and prose, by the number of its epics and historical books, by the relative slightness of the epistolary element, and by the almost complete absence of the memoir.
The slightness and slowness of variation in human races having become known, a great difficulty of the monogenist theory was seen to lie in the apparent shortness of the Biblical chronology.