It does not accord with the compass or the intention of this work to give a detailed account of the contributions of the Alexandrian Museum to the stock of human knowledge.  It is sufficient that the reader should obtain a general impression of their character.  For particulars, I may refer him to the sixth chapter of my “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.”

Euclid—­Archimedes.  It has just been remarked that the Stoical philosophy doubted whether the mind can ascertain absolute truth.  While Zeno was indulging in such doubts, Euclid was preparing his great work, destined to challenge contradiction from the whole human race.  After more than twenty-two centuries it still survives, a model of accuracy, perspicuity, and a standard of exact demonstration.  This great geometer not only wrote on other mathematical topics, such as Conic Sections and Porisms, but there are imputed to him treatises on Harmonics and Optics, the latter subject being discussed on the hypothesis of rays issuing from the eye to the object.

With the Alexandrian mathematicians and physicists must be classed Archimedes, though he eventually resided in Sicily.  Among his mathematical works were two books on the Sphere and Cylinder, in which he gave the demonstration that the solid content of a sphere is two-thirds that of its circumscribing cylinder.  So highly did he esteem this, that he directed the diagram to be engraved on his tombstone.  He also treated of the quadrature of the circle and of the parabola; he wrote on Conoids and Spheroids, and on the spiral that bears his name, the genesis of which was suggested to him by his friend Conon the Alexandrian.  As a mathematician, Europe produced no equal to him for nearly two thousand years.  In physical science he laid the foundation of hydrostatics; invented a method for the determination of specific gravities; discussed the equilibrium of floating bodies; discovered the true theory of the lever, and invented a screw, which still bears his name, for raising the water of the Nile.  To him also are to be attributed the endless screw, and a peculiar form of burning-mirror, by which, at the siege of Syracuse, it is said that he set the Roman fleet on fire.

Eratosthenes—­Apollonius—&s
hy;hipparchus.  Eratosthenes, who at one time had charge of the library, was the author of many important works.  Among them may be mentioned his determination of the interval between the tropics, and an attempt to ascertain the size of the earth.  He considered the articulation and expansion of continents, the position of mountain-chains, the action of clouds, the geological submersion of lands, the elevation of ancient sea-beds, the opening of the Dardanelles and the straits of Gibraltar, and the relations of the Euxine Sea.  He composed a complete system of the earth, in three books—­physical, mathematical, historical—­accompanied by a map of all the parts then known.  It is only of late years that the fragments remaining of his “Chronicles of the Theban Kings” have been justly appreciated.  For many centuries they were thrown into discredit by the authority of our existing absurd theological chronology.