SCIENCE AND PROGRESS 



The enormous work of transcription was done by 

 an army of slaves, and the libraries of the known 

 world were laid under tribute. This magnificent 

 collection, one of the greatest in history, was sacked 

 and in large part destroyed, not by Mohammedans, 

 but by a Christian rabble under the lead of an 

 ignorant monk named Theophilus, some six cen- 

 turies after its founding. Of the original library 

 there was little left to be burned when, 300 

 years later still, the city was taken by the caliph 

 Omar. 



The great Museum, or university, was directly 

 connected with the royal palace. It contained 

 sumptuous dining-halls, and lecture-rooms for the 

 professors, and the number of attending students 

 rose to 14,000. It counted among its professors 

 not merely linguists and grammarians, philosophers 

 and rhetoricians, but many of the founders of nat- 

 ural science. Here flourished, through more than 

 six hundred years, that long line of astronomers 

 and mathematicians, geographers and geometers, 

 physicists and physicians, beginning with Euclid 

 and not ended with Ptolemy, which made illus- 

 trious the Alexandrian school which made Alex- 

 andria, indeed, a veritable city of science. Here 

 it was that Euclid, about 300 B.C., wrote his treatise, 

 The Elements of Geometry, which is still in use, 

 with but slight changes, in our public schools. 



5 



