, as they
called it, from all travelers who visited Egypt, any valuable books
which they might have in their possession, and, retaining the originals,
give them back copies instead.

In process of time the library increased to four hundred thousand
volumes. There was then no longer any room in the buildings of the
Museum for further additions. There was, however, in another part of the
city, a great temple called the Serapion. This temple was a very
magnificent edifice, or, rather, group of edifices, dedicated to the god
Serapis. The origin and history of this temple were very remarkable. The
legend was this:

It seems that one of the ancient and long-venerated gods of the
Egyptians was a deity named Serapis. He had been, among other
divinities, the object of Egyptian adoration ages before Alexandria was
built or the Ptolemies reigned. There was also, by a curious
coincidence, a statue of the same name at a great commercial town named
Sinope, which was built upon the extremity of a promontory which
projected from Asia Minor into the Euxine Sea. Sinope was, in some
sense, the Alexandria of the north, being the center and seat of a great
portion of the commerce of that quarter of the world.

The Serapis of Sinope was considered as the protecting deity of seamen,
and the navigators who came and went to and from the city made
sacrifices to him, and offered him oblations and prayers, believing that
they were, in a great measure, dependent upon some mysterious and
inscrutable power which he exercised for their safety in storms. They
carried the knowledge of his name, and tales of his imaginary
interpositions, to all the places that they visited; and thus the fame
of the god became extended, first, to all the coasts of the Euxine Sea,
and subsequently to distant provinces and kingdoms. The Serapis of
Sinope began to be considered every where as the tutelar god of seamen.

Accordingly, when the first of the Ptolemies was forming his various
plans for adorning and aggrandizing Alexandria, he received, he said,
one night, a divine intimation in a dream that he was to obtain the
statue of Serapis from Sinope, and set it up in Alexandria, in a
suitable temple which he was in the mean time to erect in honor of the
god. It is obvious that very great advantages to the city would result
from the accomplishment of this design. In the first place, a temple to
the god Serapis would be a new distinction for it in the minds of the
rura