n with the grief that they deserve all the
various books that have perished by the fate of war in various parts of
the world. Yet we must tearfully recount the dreadful ruin which was
caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the Alexandrian war, when seven
hundred thousand volumes were consumed by fire. These volumes had been
collected by the royal Ptolemies through long periods of time, as Aulus
Gellius relates. What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to have
then perished: including the motions of the spheres, all the
conjunctions of the planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the
prognostic generations of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or
in the ether! Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where
ink is offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of
crackling parchment were encarnadined with blood, where the devouring
flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth was no
guile, where the unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so many
shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the sacrifice of
Jephthah or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is slain by a father's
sword. How many labours of the famous Hercules shall we suppose then
perished, who because of his knowledge of astronomy is said to have
sustained the heaven on his unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for
the second time cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens,
which Jonithus learnt not from man or through man but received by
divine inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the servant of unclean
spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect of
Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and finally,
what the first Adam taught his children of the things to come, which he
had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, are
believed to have perished in those horrid flames. The religion of the
Egyptians, which the book of the Perfect Word so commends; the
excellent polity of the older Athens, which preceded by nine thousand
years the Athens of Greece; the charms of the Chaldaeans; the
observations of the Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the
architecture of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic arts
of Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the problems
of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the antidotes of
Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of Parnassus; the oracles
of Apollo; th