History for ready reference, Volumes 1 to 5Larned, J. N. (Josephus Nelson)
History
History for ready reference, Volumes 1 to 5
Larned, J. N. (Josephus Nelson)
History -- Dictionaries
It was he who explored Ethiopia and the southern
parts of Africa, and brought back not only the curious fauna
to his zoological gardens, but the first knowledge of the
Troglodytes for men of science. The cultivation of science and
of letters too was so remarkably one of his pursuits that the
progress of the Alexandria of his day forms an epoch in the
world's history, and we must separate his University and its
professors from this summary, and devote to them a separate
section. … The history of the organization of the University
and its staff is covered with almost impenetrable mist. For
the Museum and Library were in the strictest sense what we
should now call an University, and one, too, of the Oxford
type, where learned men were invited to take Fellowships, and
spend their learned leisure close to observatories in science,
and a great library of books. Like the mediæval universities,
this endowment of research naturally turned into an engine for
teaching, as all who desired knowledge flocked to such a
centre, and persuaded the Fellow to become a Tutor. The model
came from Athens. There the schools, beginning with the
Academy of Plato, had a fixed property—a home with its
surrounding garden, and in order to make this foundation sure,
it was made a shrine where the Muses were worshipped, and
where the head of the school, or a priest appointed, performed
stated sacrifices. This, then, being held in trust by the
successors of the donor, who bequeathed it; to them, was a
property which it would have been sacrilegious to invade, and
so the title Museum arose for a school of learning. Demetrius
the Phalerean, the friend and protector of Theophrastus,
brought this idea with him to Alexandria, when his namesake
drove him into exile [see GREECE: B. C. 307-197] and it was no
doubt his advice to the first Ptolemy which originated the
great foundation, though Philadelphus, who again exiled
Demetrius, gets the credit of it. The pupil of Aristotle
moreover impressed on the king the necessity of storing up in
one central repository all that the world knew or could
produce, in order to ascertain the laws of things from a
proper analysis of detail. Hence was founded not only the
great library, which in those days had a thousand times the
value a great library has now, but also observatories,
zoological gardens, collections of exotic plants, and of other
new and strange things brought by exploring expeditions from
the furthest regions of Arabia and Africa. This library and
museum proved indeed a home for the Muses, and about it a most
brilliant group of students in literature and science was
formed. The successive librarians were Zenodotus, the
grammarian or critic; Callimachus, to whose poems we shall
presently return; Eratosthenes, the astronomer, who originated
the process by which the size of the earth is determined
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