Though his system has been rejected, still Ptolemy must be looked up to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "Almagest" as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. The fact that he represented a climax of astronomical development at Alexandria some four centuries after the foundation of {83} that university, serves to show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as with mathematics. Astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. Generations of professors had given themselves to research and to the publication of important works quite as in the modern time, and Alexandria may well claim the right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific problems of the world around it. The most important part of the scientific work of the University of Alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical department. It is a well-known law in the history of medicine that, whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine and in medical education is accomplished. This was eminently the case at Alexandria. The departments of the arts, of linguistics and of philosophy were gathered {84} around the great building known in Greek as the Mouseion, a word that has come to us through the Latin under the guise of Museum. This temple of the Muses contained collections of various kinds and near it was situated the great library. Not far away was the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, the Goddess of Life, around which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the medical school. As teachers for this medical school some of the greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first Ptolemy and a great period in medical history began.