attracted many scholars, scientists, poets, and philosophers.  Alexandria became the intellectual metropolis of the world; and it might truly be said to have been the Paris of antiquity.  At the courts of the Ptolemies, the Medicis of Egypt, the greatest men of the age lived and taught.  Demetrius Phalerius, one of the most learned and cultured men of an age of learning and knowledge, when driven from his luxurious palace at Athens, found hospitality at the court of Ptolemy Soter.  The foundation of the famous Museion and library of Alexandria was most probably due to his influence.  He advised the first Ptolemy to found a building where poets, scholars, and philosophers would have facilities for study, research, and speculation.  The Museion was similar in some respects to the Academy of Plato.  It was an edifice where scholars lived and worked together.  Mental qualification was the only requirement for admission.  Nationality and creed were no obstacles to those whose learning rendered them worthy of becoming members of this ideal academy and of being received among the immortals of antiquity.  The Museion was in no sense a university, but an academy for the cultivation of the higher branches of learning.  It might be compared in some respects to the College de France, or regarded as a development of the system under which scholars had already lived and worked together in the Ramesseum under Ramses II.  The generosity of the Lagidas provided amply for this new centre of learning and study.  Free from worldly cares, the scholars could leisurely gather information and hand down to posterity the fruits of their researches.  From all parts of the world men flocked to this centre of fashionable learning, the birthplace of modern science.  All that was brilliant and cultured, all the coryphees in the domain of intellect, were attracted by that splendid court.

In the shade of the Museion a brilliant assembly—­Ptolemy, Euclid, Hipparchus, Apollonius, and Eratosthenes—­made great discoveries and added materially to the sum of human knowledge.  Here Euclid wrote his immortal “Elements;” and Herophilos, the father of surgery, added valuable information to the knowledge of anatomy.  The art and process of embalming, in such vogue among the Egyptians, naturally fostered the advance of this science.  Whilst Alexandria in abstract speculation could not rival Greece, yet it became the home of the pioneers of positive science, who left a great and priceless legacy to modern civilisation.  The importance of this event (the foundation of the Museion), says Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, though hitherto little understood, admits of no exaggeration so far as the intellectual progress of Europe is concerned.  The Museum made an impression upon the intellectual career of Europe so powerful and enduring that we still enjoy its results.  If the purely literary productions of that age have sometimes been looked upon with contempt, European