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Pappus wrote a description of the world, and a commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest, beside a work on geometry, published under the name of his Mathematical Collections.
The Almagest of Ptolemy was translated into Latin at his instance, being introduced to the Western world through this curious channel. At this time it became quite usual for the Italian and Spanish scholars to understand Arabic although they were totally ignorant of Greek. In the field of physical science one of the most important of the Arabian scientists was Alhazen.
And now we are together, O mysterious tome, whose Arab name breathes a strange mustiness of occult lore and claims kindred with the sciences of almagest and alchemy. What will you show me? Let us turn the leaves at random. Before fixing one's eyes on a definite point in the landscape, it is well to take a summary view of the whole.
But when it came to almagest and astrolabe, the counting of figures and reckoning of epicycles, away would go her thoughts to horse and hound, and a vacant eye and listless face would warn the teacher that he had lost his hold upon his scholar.
At Alexandria, in Egypt, the length of the year was determined yet more exactly by observing when the sun rose exactly in the east and set exactly in the west, a date which fixed the equinox for them as for us. More than seventeen hundred years ago, Ptolemy, the great author of The Almagest, had fixed the length of the year to within a very few minutes.
We have already stated that the astrolobe, which had been previously applied only to astronomical purposes, was accommodated to the use of mariners by Martin Behaim, towards the end of the fifteenth century. He was a scholar of Muller, of Koningsberg, better known under the name of Regiomontanus, who published the Almagest of Ptolemy.
The famous "Almagest" of Ptolemy, the most important work of ancient astronomy, was translated from a Greek manuscript, as early as 1160, by a medical student of Salerno. Haskins and Lockwood: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1910, XXI, pp. 75-102.
But those Arabic translations of Greek authors were a fatal gift for Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift for Bagdad. In that Almagest of Ptolemy, in that Organon of Aristotle, which the Crusaders are said to have brought home, lay, rude and embryotic, the germs of that physical science, that geographical knowledge which has opened to the European the commerce and the colonisation of the globe.
Mercator, in his maps and charts, chose Corvo, one of the Azores, for his first meridian, because at that time it was the line of no variation of the compass. We have already alluded to Regiomontanus, as a celebrated mathematician, and as having published the Almagest of Ptolemy. He seems, likewise, to have written notes on Ptolemy's Geography.
The most noted of all the writings of Ptolemy is the work which became famous under the Arabic name of Almagest. From this it derived the word Almagest, by which Ptolemy's work continued to be known among the Arabs, and subsequently among Europeans when the book again became known in the West. Ptolemy's book, as has been said, is virtually an elaboration of the doctrines of Hipparchus.
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