The ancient world, from the earliest times to 800 AD . radition that it was the work of seventy scholars. 320. Science made greater strides than ever before in anequal length of time. Medicine, surgery, botany, and mechan-ics became real sciences for the first time. Archimedes ofSyracuse discovered the principle of the lever, and of specificgravity, and constructed burning mirrors and new hurlingengines which made effective siege artillery.^ Euclid, a Greekat Alexandria, building upon the old Egyptian knowledge, praduced the geometry which is still taught in our schools with 1 See Davis Readin
The ancient world, from the earliest times to 800 AD . radition that it was the work of seventy scholars. 320. Science made greater strides than ever before in anequal length of time. Medicine, surgery, botany, and mechan-ics became real sciences for the first time. Archimedes ofSyracuse discovered the principle of the lever, and of specificgravity, and constructed burning mirrors and new hurlingengines which made effective siege artillery.^ Euclid, a Greekat Alexandria, building upon the old Egyptian knowledge, praduced the geometry which is still taught in our schools with 1 See Davis Readings, Vol. II, No. 27. §320] SCIENCE 293 little addition. Eratosthenes (born 276 ), the librarian atAlexandria, wrote a systematic work on geography, inventeddelicate astronomical instruments, and devised the presentway of measuring the circumference of the earth — withresults nearly correct. A little later, Aristarchus taught thatthe earth moved round the sun; and Hipparchus calculatedeclipses, catalogued the stars, wrote books on astronomy, and. founded the science of trigonometry. Aristotle had alreadygiven all the proofs of the sphericity of the earth that arecommon in our text-books now (except that of actual circum-navigation) and had asserted that men could probably reach Asiaby sailing west from Europe. The scientific spirit gave rise,too, to actual voyages of exploration into many regions; anddaring discoverers brought back from northern regions whatseemed wild tales of icebergs gleaming in the cold aurora ofthe polar skies. The lighthouse built by the first Ptolemy on the island ofPharos, in the harbor of Alexandria, shows that the newcivilization had begun to make practical use of science to 294 THE GRAECO-ORIENTAL WORLD [§321 advance human welfare. The tower rose 325 feet into theair, and from the summit a group of polished reflecting mirrorsthrew its light at night far out to sea. It seemed to the Jew-ish citizens of Alexandria to make real once more the oldHe
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