OF THE UNIVERSE. EPOCH OF THE PTOLEMIES. 173 



cyclopsedic knowledge was favourable to the comparison of 

 the results of observation, and thus tended to facilitate 

 generalisations in the view of Nature. The great scientific 

 . Institution which owed its origin to the two first Ptolemies, 

 long maintained amongst other privileges that of its members 

 being free to labour in wholly different directions ( 26 ?) ; and 

 thus, although settled in a foreign country, and surrounded 

 by men of many different races and nations, they preserved 

 the peculiar Hellenic character of thought, and the acute 

 Hellenic ingenuity. 



In accordance with .the spirit and form of the present 

 historic representation, a few examples may suffice to shew 

 the manner in which, under the protecting influence of the 

 Ptolemies, observation and experiment assumed their ap- 

 propriate places, as the true sources of knowledge re- 

 specting the heavens and the earth; and how, in the 

 Alexandrian period, in combination with a diligent ac- 

 cumulation of the mere materials of knowledge, a happy 

 tendency to generalisation was also at all times manifested. 

 Although the different Greek schools of philosophy trans- 

 planted to Lower Egypt did not escape a certain degree of 

 Oriental degeneracy, and gave occasion to many mythical in- 

 terpretations of Nature and of physical phenomena, yet in the 

 Alexandrian school the Platonic doctrines ( 268 ) still remained 

 as the most secure support of mathematical knowledge. 

 The progressive advances made in this knowledge embraced 

 almost at the same time pure mathematics, mechanics and 

 astronomy. In Plato's high esteem for mathematical de- 

 velopment of thought, as well as in Aristotle's morphological 

 views embracing all organic beings, were contained the germs 

 of all later advances in natural science; they became the 



