The Museum of Alexandria (with its library) must be carefully distinguished from the city and the people. It was an artificial institution, which took its rise altogether from the personal taste and munificence of the earlier Ptolemies, especially the second. It was one of the noblest and most useful institutions recorded in history, and forms the most honorable monument of what Droysen calls the _hellenistic_ period, between the death of Alexander and the extension of the Roman empire into Asia. But this Museum, though situated at Alexandria, had no peculiar connection with the city or its population; it was a College of literary Fellows (if we may employ a modern word) congregated out of various Grecian towns. Eratosthenes, Kallimuchus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus, were not natives of Alexandria. Thus much is necessary in order to understand the bearing of Alexander’s conquests, not only upon the hellenic population, but upon hellenic attributes and peculiarities. While crushing the Greeks as communities at home, these conquests opened a wider range to the Greeks as individuals abroad; and produced—perhaps the best of all their effects—a great increase of intercommunication, multiplication of roads, extension of commercial dealing, and enlarged facilities for the acquisition of geographical knowledge. There already existed in the Persian empire an easy and convenient royal road (established by Darius son of Hystaspes and described as well as admired by Herodotus) for the three months’ journey between Sardis and Susa; and there must have been another regular road from Susa and Ekbatana to Baktria, Sogdiana, and India. Alexander, had he lived, would doubtless have multiplied on a still larger scale the communications both by sea and land between the various parts of his world-empire. We read that among the gigantic projects which he was contemplating when surprised by death, one was, the construction of a road all along the northern coast of Africa, as far as the Pillars of Herakles.[651] He had intended to found a new maritime city on the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and to incur much outlay for regulating the flow of water in its lower course. The river would probably have been thus made again to afford the same conveniences, both for navigation and irrigation, as it appears to have furnished in earlier times under the ancient Babylonian kings. Orders had been also given for constructing a fleet to explore the Caspian Sea. Alexander believed that sea to be connected with the Eastern Ocean,[652] and intended to make it his point of departure for circumnavigating the eastern limits of Asia, which country yet remained for him to conquer. The voyage already performed by Nearchus, from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates, was in those days a splendid maritime achievement; to which another still greater was on the point of being added—the circumnavigation