s in mental culture
and learned lectures and debates. The scientific studies inaugurated by
Aristotle were here continued by a succession of great astronomers,
geometers, chemists, and physicians, for whose use were furnished a
botanical garden, a menagerie of animals, and facilities for human
dissection, the first school of anatomy ever known.

In the heart of the great library, battening on books, flourished a
circle of learned literary critics, engaged in the study of Homer and
the other already classical writers of Greece and supplying new and
revised editions of their works. Here philosophy was ardently pursued,
the works of Plato and his great rivals being diligently studied, while
in a later age the innovation of Neoplatonism was abundantly debated and
taught. A new school of poetry also arose, most of its followers being
mechanical versifiers, though the idyllic poets of Sicily sought these
favoring halls. Most famous among the philosophers of Alexandria was the
maiden Hypatia, who had studied in the still active schools of Athens,
and taught the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the then popular
tenets of Neoplatonism--her fame being chiefly due to her violent and
terrible death at the hands of fanatical opponents of her teachings.

The dynasty of the Ptolemies vanished with the death of Cleopatra, and
during the wars and struggles that followed the library disappeared and
the supremacy of Alexandria as a centre of mental culture passed away.
The literary culture of Athens, whose schools of philosophy long
survived its downfall as the capital of an independent state, also
disappeared after being plundered of many of its works of art by Sulla,
the Roman tyrant, and in later years for the adornment of
Constantinople; its schools were closed by order of the Emperor
Justinian in 529 A.D.; and with them the light of science and learning,
which had been shining for many centuries, though very dimly at the
last, was extinguished, and the final vestige of the glory of Athens and
the artistic and literary supremacy of Greece vanished from the land of
their birth.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The sequel to this episode will be found in the tale entitled "The
Fortune of Croesus."

[2] Equal to about one thousand dollars.

[3] The army of Sparta, which before had stayed at home to await the
full of the moon, did so now to complete certain religious ceremonies,
sparing but this handful of men for the vital nee