medicines. In this regard the work of Theophrastus, is more
nearly akin to the natural history of the famous Roman compiler,
Pliny. It remained, however, throughout antiquity as the most
important work on its subject, and it entitles Theophrastus to be
called the "father of botany." Theophrastus deals also with the
mineral kingdom after much the same fashion, and here again his
work is the most notable that was produced in antiquity.



IX. GREEK SCIENCE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD

We are entering now upon the most important scientific epoch of
antiquity. When Aristotle and Theophrastus passed from the scene,
Athens ceased to be in any sense the scientific centre of the
world. That city still retained its reminiscent glory, and cannot
be ignored in the history of culture, but no great scientific
leader was ever again to be born or to take up his permanent
abode within the confines of Greece proper. With almost
cataclysmic suddenness, a new intellectual centre appeared on the
south shore of the Mediterranean. This was the city of
Alexandria, a city which Alexander the Great had founded during
his brief visit to Egypt, and which became the capital of Ptolemy
Soter when he chose Egypt as his portion of the dismembered
empire of the great Macedonian. Ptolemy had been with his master
in the East, and was with him in Babylonia when he died. He had
therefore come personally in contact with Babylonian
civilization, and we cannot doubt that this had a most important
influence upon his life, and through him upon the new
civilization of the West. In point of culture, Alexandria must be
regarded as the successor of Babylon, scarcely less directly than
of Greece. Following the Babylonian model, Ptolemy erected a
great museum and began collecting a library. Before his death it
was said that he had collected no fewer than two hundred thousand
manuscripts. He had gathered also a company of great teachers and
founded a school of science which, as has just been said, made
Alexandria the culture-centre of the world.

Athens in the day of her prime had known nothing quite like this.
Such private citizens as Aristotle are known to have had
libraries, but there were no great public collections of books in
Athens, or in any other part of the Greek domain, until Ptolemy
founded his famous library. As is well known, such libraries had
existed in Babylonia for thousands of years. The character which
the Ptolemaic epoch took on was no doubt due to Babylonian
influence, but quite as much to the personal experience of
Ptolemy himself as an explorer in the Far East. The marvellous
conquering journey of Alexander had enormously widened the
horizon of the Greek geographer, and stimulated the imagination
of all ranks of the people, It was but natural, then, that
geography and its parent science astronomy should occupy the
attention of the best minds in this succeeding epoch. In point of
fact, such a company of star-gazers and earth-measurers came upon
the scene in this third century B.C. as had never before existed
anywhere in the world. The whole trend of the time was towards
mechanics. It was as if the greatest thinkers had squarely faced
about from the attitude of the mystical philosophers of the
preceding century, and had set themselves the task of solving all
the mechanical riddles of the universe, They no longer troubled
themselves about problems of "being" and "becoming"; they gave
but little heed to metaphysical subtleties; they demanded that
their thoughts should be gauged by objective realities. Hence
there arose a succession of great geometers, and their
conceptions were applied to the construction of new mechanical
contrivances on the one hand, and to the elaboration of theories
of sidereal mechanics on the other.

The wonderful company of men who performed the feats that are
about to be recorded did not all find their home in Alexandria,
to be sure; but they all came more or less under the Alexandrian
influence. We shall see that there are two other important
centres; one out in Sicily, almost at the confines of the Greek
territory in the west; the other in Asia Minor, notably on the
island of Samos--the island which, it will be recalled, was at an
earlier day the birthplace of Pythagoras. But whereas in the
previous century colonists from the confines of the civilized
world came to Athens, now all eyes turned towards Alexandria, and
so improved were the facilities for communication that no doubt
the discoveries of one coterie of workers were known to all the
others much more quickly than had ever been possible before. We
learn, for example, that the studies of Aristarchus of Samos were
definitely known to Archimedes of Syracuse, out in Sicily.
Indeed, as we shall see, it is through a chance reference
preserved in one of the writings of Archimedes that one of the
most important speculations of Aristarchus is made known to us.
This illustrates sufficiently the intercommunication through
which the thought of the Alexandrian epoch was brought into a
single channel. We no longer, as in the day of the earlier
schools of Greek philosophy, have isolated groups of thinkers.
The scientific drama is now played out upon a single stage; and
if we pass, as we shall in the present chapter, from Alexandria
to Syracuse and from Syracuse to Samos, the shift of scenes does
no violence to the dramatic unities.

Notwithstanding the number of great workers who were not properly
Alexandrians, none the less the epoch is with propriety termed
Alexandrian. Not merely in the third century B.C., but throughout
the lapse of at least four succeeding centuries, the city of
Alexander and the Ptolemies continued to hold its place as the
undisputed culture-centre of the world. During that period Rome


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