Books were the great essentials at Alexandria. This is not surprising seeing that the university was founded around a great library, and that this library continued to be the greatest in the world in its time. Every student who came to Alexandria bringing a book with him of which there was {69} no copy in the library, was required by a decree of the authorities to leave a copy behind him. In all the university towns of the times--and there were many founded in the rising eastern cities of Alexander's empire, as it gradually crumbled into smaller pieces providing new capitals with less power but with quite as much national feeling as the capital cities of larger states, libraries became the fashion and a city's main claim to prestige in education and the intellectual life was the number of its books. Antioch, Tarsus, Cos, Cnidos and Pergamos are examples of this state of affairs. Pergamos was so jealous of the prestige of the Alexandrian Library that it forbade the exportation of parchment, an invention of Pergamos which received its name from that city. Petty jealousies were quite as much the rule among educational institutions then as they have been at any time since. To many people it will seem quite absurd to talk of Alexandria as having done serious scientific work because the methods of science and scientific investigation are supposed to have been, as they think, discovered by Lord Bacon in the seventeenth century. It is curious how many educated people, or at least supposedly educated people, have this as their basic notion of the history of science. Men wandered in the mazes of inductive reasoning utterly unable to bring observations together in such a way as to discover laws, utterly incompetent to note phenomena and {70} bring them into relations to one another so as to show their scientific bearing, until Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor came to show the way out of the labyrinth and leave the precious cord through its corridors, by which others may easily thread their way into the free air of scientific truth. I know nothing that is more absurd than this. It is a commonplace among educators, however; it is frequently referred to in educational addresses as if it were a universally accepted proposition, and to dispute it would seem the rankest kind of scientific heresy to these narrow minds. Fortunately there are two writers, Macaulay and Huxley, to whom even these people are likely to listen, who have expressed themselves with regard to this precious historic superstition that Lord Bacon invented the inductive method of reasoning with what my long-worded friend would call appropriate opprobrium.