the sun and moon from the earth--with, however, only partial success. It
considers the precession of the equinoxes, the discovery of Hipparchus,
the full period of which is twenty-five thousand years. It gives a
catalogue of 1,022 stars, treats of the nature of the milky-way, and
discusses in the most masterly manner the motions of the planets. This
point constitutes another of Ptolemy's claims to scientific fame. His
determination of the planetary orbits was accomplished by comparing
his own observations with those of former astronomers, among them the
observations of Timocharis on the planet Venus.

INVENTION OF THE STEAM-ENGINE. In the Museum of Alexandria, Ctesibius
invented the fire-engine. His pupil, Hero, improved it by giving it two
cylinders. There, too, the first steam-engine worked. This also was the
invention of Hero, and was a reaction engine, on the principle of
the eolipile. The silence of the halls of Serapis was broken by the
water-clocks of Ctesibius and Apollonius, which drop by drop measured
time. When the Roman calendar had fallen into such confusion that it
had become absolutely necessary to rectify it, Julius Caesar brought
Sosigenes the astronomer from Alexandria. By his advice the lunar year
was abolished, the civil year regulated entirely by the sun, and the
Julian calendar introduced.

The Macedonian rulers of Egypt have been blamed for the manner in which
they dealt with the religious sentiment of their time. They prostituted
it to the purpose of state-craft, finding in it a means of governing
their lower classes. To the intelligent they gave philosophy.

POLICY OF THE PTOLEMIES. But doubtless they defended this policy by the
experience gathered in those great campaigns which had made the Greeks
the foremost nation of the world. They had seen the mythological
conceptions of their ancestral country dwindle into fables; the wonders
with which the old poets adorned the Mediterranean had been discovered
to be baseless illusions. From Olympus its divinities had disappeared;
indeed, Olympus itself had proved to be a phantom of the imagination.
Hades had lost its terrors; no place could be found for it.

From the woods and grottoes and rivers of Asia Minor the local gods and
goddesses had departed; even their devotees began to doubt whether they
had ever been there. If still the Syrian damsels lamented, in their
amorous ditties, the fate of Adonis, it was only as a recollection, not
as a realit