and which ennoble the mind and mend the heart; but it was the school to which the world long looked for knowledge in all those sciences which help the body and improve the arts of life, and which are sometimes called useful knowledge.  Though great and good actions may not have been unknown in Alexandria, so few valued them that none took the trouble to record them.  The well-paid writers never wrote the lives of the Ptolemies.  The muse of history had no seat in the museum, but it was almost the birthplace of anatomy, geometry, conic sections, geography, astronomy, and hydrostatics.

[Illustration:  357.jpg GRAND COLUMN AT KARNAK]

If we retrace the steps by which this Graeco-Egyptian monarchy rose and fell, we shall see that virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, care and thoughtlessness, were for the most part followed by the rewards which to us seem natural.  The Egyptian gold which first tempted the Greeks into the country, and then helped their energies to raise the monarchy, afterwards undermined those same energies, and became one of the principal causes of its final overthrow.

In Ptolemy Soter we see plain manners, careful plans, untiring activity, and a wise choice of friends.  By him talents were highly paid wherever they were found; no service left unrewarded; the people trusted and taught the use of arms; their love gained by wise laws and even-handed justice; docks, harbours, and fortresses built, schools opened; and by these means a great monarchy founded.  Ptolemy was eager to fill the ranks of his armies with soldiers, and his new city with traders.  Instead of trying to govern against the will of the people, to thwart or overlook their wishes and feelings, his utmost aim was to guide them, and to make Alexandria a more agreeable place of settlement than the cities of Asia Minor and Syria, for the thousands who were then pouring out of Greece on the check given to its trading industry by the overthrow of its freedom.  Though every thinking man might have seen that the new government, when it gained shape and strength, would be a military despotism; yet his Greek subjects must have felt, while it was weak and resting on their good-will rather than on their habits, that they were enjoying many of the blessings of freedom.  Had they then claimed a share in the government, they would most likely have gained it, and thereby they would have handed down those blessings to their children.

Before the death of Ptolemy Soter, the habits of the people had so closely entwined themselves round the throne, that Philadelphus was able to take the kingdom and the whole of its wide provinces at the hands of his father as a family estate.  He did nothing to mar his father’s wise plans, which then ripened into fruit-bearing.  Trade crowded the harbours and markets, learning filled the schools, conquests rewarded the discipline of the fleets and armies; power, wealth, and splendour followed in due order.  The blaze thus cast around the throne would by many