ALEXANDRIA. 47o 



of beauty ; the nudity of the gymnasium ; all these 

 sufficiently explain the unexampled progress of the 

 nation, and the origin of that progress, as in all other 

 cases, is to be found in physical geography. Greece 

 was divided into natural cantons ; each state was a 

 fortress ; while Egypt, Assyria, India, and China were 

 wide and open plains, which cavalry could sweep, and 

 which peasants with their sickles could not defend. 

 But the rivalry of the Greeks among themselves, 

 so useful to the development of mental life, prevented 

 them from combining into one great nation ; and 

 Alexander, although he was a Greek by descent, for 

 he had the right of contending at the Olympian games, 

 conquered the east with an army of barbarians, his 

 Greek troops being merely a contingent. But the 

 kingdoms of Asia and Egypt were Greek, and in Alex- 

 andria the foundations of science were laid. The 

 astrolabes which had been invented by the Egyp- 

 tians were improved by the Greeks and afterwards 

 by the Arabs, were adapted to purposes of navigation 

 by the Portuguese, and were developed to the sextant 

 of the nineteenth century. The Egyptians had in- 

 vented the blow-pipe, the crucible, and the alembic ; 

 the Alexandrines commenced or continued the pursuit 

 of alchemy, which the Arabs also preserved, and which 

 has since grown into the science of Lavoisier, and 

 Faraday. Hippocrates separated medicine from 

 theology ; his successors dissected and experimentalised 

 at Alexandria, learning something no doubt from the 

 Egyptian school ; the Arabs followed in a servile 

 manner the medicine of the Greeks ; and the modern 

 Europeans, obtained from the Canon of Avicenna the 

 first elements of a science which has made much 

 progress, but which is yet in its infancy, and which 



