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It is almost inconceivable that men like Euclid and Archimedes, and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus and Hero, could have been the victims of such illusions regarding occult forces of nature as were constantly postulated by Oriental science.
Here Aristarchus resided, and also Eratosthenes, who lived between the years 276 and 196 B.C. The latter was a native of Athens, but was invited by Ptolemy Euergetes to Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth.
In this science such men as Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy were great lights of whom humanity may be proud; and had they been assisted by our modern inventions, they might have earned a fame scarcely eclipsed by that of Kepler and Newton.
The hemisphere KA being marked with a scale, it is obvious that in actual practice Eratosthenes required only to set his gnomon in the sunlight at the proper moment, and read off the answer to his problem at a glance. Of course it is the method, and not its details or its exact results, that excites our interest. And beyond question the method was an admirable one.
Every minute changed the landscape which fled from beneath their gaze. About half past one o'clock in the morning, they caught a glimpse of the tops of another mountain. Barbicane, consulting his map, recognized Eratosthenes. It was a ringed mountain nine thousand feet high, and one of those circles so numerous on this satellite.
To him also are to be attributed the endless screw, and a peculiar form of burning-mirror, by which, at the siege of Syracuse, it is said that he set the Roman fleet on fire. ERATOSTHENES APOLLONIUS HIPPARCHUS. Eratosthenes, who at one time had charge of the library, was the author of many important works.
He saw the turning of that first and greatest century of Alexandrian science, the third century before our era. He died in the year 196 B.C., having, it is said, starved himself to death to escape the miseries of blindness; to the measurer of shadows, life without light seemed not worth the living. Eratosthenes left no immediate successor.
The defect in the writer of the Lettres Persanes is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, as we remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria.
Demetrius Phalareus, perhaps the most learned man of his age, who had been governor of Athens for many years, was the first so appointed. Under him was the librarian, an office sometimes held by men whose names have descended to our times, as Eratosthenes, and Apollonius Rhodius. These gardens, as their names import, were for the purpose of facilitating the study of plants and animals.
Italy, off to the west, is the home of Pythagoras and Xenophanes in their later years, and of Parmenides and Empedocles, Zeno, and Archimedes. Northern Africa can claim, by birth or by adoption, such names as Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Aristippus, Eratosthenes, Ctesibius, Hero, Strabo, and Ptolemy.
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