The Museum and Library at Alexandria 145 made the first star map and catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the greater stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers. Archimedes came from Syra- cuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the greatest of Greek anatomists, and- is said to have practised vivisection. For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II there was such a blaze of knoAvledge and discovery at Alexandria as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century a.d. But it did not continue. There may have been several causes of this decline. Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was the fact that the Museum was a " royal " college and all its professors and fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. This- was all very well when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they fell under the sway of Egyptian priests, and Egyptian religious developments, they ceased to follow the work that was done, and their control stifled the spirit of enquiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its first century of activity. Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclo- paedic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was- not simply a storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling- organization. A great army of copyists Avas set to work perpetually multiplying copies of books. Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual process in which we live to-day ; here we have the sytematic gathering and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Museum and Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true beginning of Modern History. Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the artizan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those days, but they were not in mental contact with, the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials and so forth, but he never made a Flor- entine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not seem to have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and jewellery but he never K
