East, and was with
him in Babylonia when he died. He had therefore come personally in
contact with Babylonian civilization, and we cannot doubt that this had
a most important influence upon his life, and through him upon the
new civilization of the West. In point of culture, Alexandria must be
regarded as the successor of Babylon, scarcely less directly than of
Greece. Following the Babylonian model, Ptolemy erected a great museum
and began collecting a library. Before his death it was said that he
had collected no fewer than two hundred thousand manuscripts. He had
gathered also a company of great teachers and founded a school of
science which, as has just been said, made Alexandria the culture-centre
of the world.

Athens in the day of her prime had known nothing quite like this. Such
private citizens as Aristotle are known to have had libraries, but there
were no great public collections of books in Athens, or in any other
part of the Greek domain, until Ptolemy founded his famous library. As
is well known, such libraries had existed in Babylonia for thousands of
years. The character which the Ptolemaic epoch took on was no doubt due
to Babylonian influence, but quite as much to the personal experience
of Ptolemy himself as an explorer in the Far East. The marvellous
conquering journey of Alexander had enormously widened the horizon of
the Greek geographer, and stimulated the imagination of all ranks of the
people, It was but natural, then, that geography and its parent
science astronomy should occupy the attention of the best minds in this
succeeding epoch. In point of fact, such a company of star-gazers and
earth-measurers came upon the scene in this third century B.C. as had
never before existed anywhere in the world. The whole trend of the time
was towards mechanics. It was as if the greatest thinkers had squarely
faced about from the attitude of the mystical philosophers of the
preceding century, and had set themselves the task of solving all the
mechanical riddles of the universe, They no longer troubled themselves
about problems of "being" and "becoming"; they gave but little heed to
metaphysical subtleties; they demanded that their thoughts should be
gauged by objective realities. Hence there arose a succession of great
geometers, and their conceptions were applied to the construction of
new mechanical contrivances on the one hand, and to the elaboration of
theories of sidereal mechanics on the other.

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