he threw himself into that sea, and when falling said, "Let the Euripus
receive me since I cannot comprehend it." And lastly, it is affirmed by
others that he died of a colic in the sixty-third year of his age, two
years after the death of his pupil, Alexander the Great.

By the Stagirites, altars were erected to him as a god.

Aristotle made a will, of which Antipater was appointed the executor. He
left a son called Nicomachus, and a daughter who was married to a
grandson of Demaratus, king of Lacedaemonia.

ARCHIMEDES

By JOHN TIMBS, F.S.A.

(287-212 B.C.)

[Illustration: A boat. [TN]]

It is scarcely possible to view the vast steamships of our day without
reflecting that to a great master of mechanics, upward of two thousand
years since, we in part owe the invention of the machine by which these
mighty vessels are propelled upon the wide world of waters. This power
is an application of "the Screw of Archimedes," the most celebrated of
the Greek geometricians. He was born in Sicily, in the Corinthian colony
of Syracuse, in the year 287 B.C., and when a very young man, was
fortunate enough to enjoy the patronage of his relative Hiero, the
reigning prince of Syracuse.

The ancients attribute to Archimedes more than forty mechanical
inventions--among which are the endless screw; the combination of
pulleys; an hydraulic organ, according to Tertullian; a machine called
the HELIX, or screw, for launching ships; and a machine called
_loculus_, which appears to have consisted of forty pieces, by the
putting together of which various objects could be framed, and which
were used by boys as a sort of artificial memory.

Archimedes is said to have obtained the friendship and confidence of
Hiero by the following incident. The king had delivered a certain weight
of gold to a workman, to be made into a crown. When the crown was made
and sent to the king, a suspicion arose in the royal mind that the gold
had been adulterated by the alloy of a baser metal, and he applied to
Archimedes for his assistance in detecting the imposture; the difficulty
was to measure the bulk of the crown without melting it into a regular
figure; for silver being, weight for weight, of greater bulk than gold,
any alloy of the former in place of an equal weight of the latter would
necessarily increase the bulk of the crown; and at that time there was
no known means of testing the purity of metal. Archimedes, after many
unsuccessful attempt