100 THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA. 



to spend hours in the studio of Apelles, sitting down 

 among the boys, who ground colours for the great 

 painter. He delighted in everything that was new 

 and rare. He invented exploration. He gave a large 

 sum of money to Aristotle to assist him in compos- 

 ing the History of Animals, and employed a number 

 of men to collect for him in Asia. He sent him 

 a copy of the astronomical records of the Baby- 

 lonians, although by that time they had quarrelled 

 like Dionysius and Plato, Frederic and Voltair.e. It 

 is taken for granted that Alexander was the one to 

 blame, as if philosophers were immaculate, and pri- 

 vate tutors never in the wrong.. 



The Ptolemies were not unworthy followers of Alex- 

 ander. They established the Museum, which was a 

 kind of college with a hall, where the professors dined 

 together, with corridors for promenading lectures, and 

 a theatre for scholastic festivals and public disputa- 

 tions. Attached to it also was the Botanical Garden, 

 filled with medicinal and exotic plants ; a menagerie 

 of wild beasts and rare birds : and the famous Library, 

 where 700,000 volumes were arranged on cedar 

 shelves, and where hundreds of clerks were continu- 

 ally at work, copying from scroll to scroll, gluing the 

 separate strips of papyrus together, smoothing with 

 pumice-stone and blackening the edges, writing the 

 titles on red labels, fastening ivory tops on the sticks 

 round which the rolls were wrapped. 



All the eminent men of the day were invited to 

 take up their abode at the Museum, and persons were 

 despatched into all countries to collect books. It was 

 dangerous to bring original manuscripts into Egypt; 

 they were at once seized and copied ; and only the 

 copies were returned. The city of Athens lent the 



