A wild astronomy had thus supplanted the astronomy of Hipparchus; the miserable fictions of Eusebius had subverted the chronology of Manetho and Eratosthenes; the geometry of Euclid and Apollonius was held to be of no use; the geography of Ptolemy a blunder; the great mechanical inventions of Archimedes incomparably surpassed by the miracles worked at the shrines of a hundred saints. [Sidenote: Intrinsic weakness of the Patristic system.] Of such a mixture of truth and of folly was Patristicism composed. Ignorance in power had found it necessary to have a false and unprogressive science, forgetting that sooner or later the time must arrive when it would be impossible to maintain stationary ideas in a world of which the affairs are ever advancing. A failure to include in the system thus imposed upon men any provision for intellectual progress was the great and fatal mistake of those times. Each passing century brought its incompatibilities. A strain upon the working of the system soon occurred, and perpetually increased in force. It became apparent that, in the end, the imposition would be altogether unable to hold together. On a future page we shall see what were the circumstances under which it at last broke down. [Sidenote: It commences by extinguishing Greek science.] The wonder-worker who prepares to exhibit his phantasmagoria upon the wall, knows well how much it adds to the delusion to have all lights extinguished save that which is in his own dark lantern. I have now to relate how the last flickering rays of Greek learning were put out; how Patristicism, aided by her companion Bigotry, attempted to lay the foundations of her influence in security. [Sidenote: Acts of the Emperor Theodosius.] [Sidenote: Alexandrian libraries.] [Sidenote: Library of Pergamus transferred to Egypt.]