Those who are not given to pedestrian exercise can easily avail themselves of a cab or donkey, and they will find the streets, which are spacious and handsome, very pleasant to traverse, as they are all well paved in the city; but the dust outside the walls covers the ground from four to six inches deep, and in combination with the intense glare of the sun, and the wretched hovels of the natives, produces the ophthalmia so common, especially among the Arabs. Owing to the want of proper drainage, what would otherwise be a salubrious site is subject to malarious disease and the plague.
I have spoken of the Alexandrian library; quite as much may be said of the Alexandrian school; combined, they may be justly considered the first academy of arts and sciences.
The grammarians and poets are the most important among the scholars of Alexandria. These grammarians were philologists and literati, who explained things as well as words, and may be considered a sort of encyclopedists. Such were Zenodotus the Ephesian, who established the first grammar school in Alexandria; Eratosthenes, of Cyrene; Aristophanes, of Byzantium; Aristarchus, of Samothrace; Crates, of Mallus; Dionysius the Thracian; Appolonius the sophist; and Zoilus. To the poets belong Appolonius the Rhodian, Lycophron, Aratus, Nicander, Emphorion, Callimachus, Theocritus, Philetas, Phanocles, Timon the Philasian, Scymnus, Dionysius, and seven tragic poets, who were called Alexandrian Pleiads.
The most violent religious controversies disturbed the Alexandrian church until the orthodox tenets were established in it by Athanasius, in the controversy with the Arians.
Among the scholars are to be found great mathematicians, as Euclid, the father of scientific geometry, and whose work, I distinctly recollect, was a great bore to me in my younger days; Appolonius, of Perga, in Pamphylia, whose work on conic sections still exists; Nichomachus, the first scientific arithmetician; astronomers, who employed the Egyptian hieroglyphics for marking the northern hemisphere, and fixed the images and names (still in use) of the Constellations, who left astronomical writings (e.g., the Phœnomena of Aratus, a didactic poem; the Spherica of Menelaus; the anatomical works of Eratosthenes, and especially the Magna Syntaxis of the geographer Ptolemy), and made improvements in the theory of the calendar, which were afterwards adopted into the Julian calendar; natural philosophers, anatomists, as Herophilus and Erasistratus; physicians and surgeons, as Demosthenes Philalethes, who wrote the first work on diseases of the eye; Zopyrus and Cratenas, who improved the art of pharmacy and invented antidotes; instructors in the art of medicine, to whom Asclepiades, Loranus, and Galen owed their education; medical theorists and empirics, of the sect founded by Philinus. All these belonged to the numerous association of scholars continuing under the Roman dominion and favoured by the Roman emperors, which rendered Alexandria one of the most renowned and influential seats of science in antiquity. With this passing glance at Alexandria, we will journey on to Cairo.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FERTILIZING RIVERS OF EGYPT—LEAVE ALEXANDRIA—INCIDENTS EN ROUTE—SHEPHEARD’S HOTEL—ANCIENT AND MODERN CAIRO—THE DONKEY BOYS—ARAB PATIENTS—DANCING DERVISHES—THE HOUSE WHERE JOSEPH, MARY, AND THE INFANT SAVIOUR LIVED IN OLD CAIRO—THE BAULAC MUSEUM—THE PETRIFIED FOREST—MOKATTAM HILLS—TOMBS OF THE CALIPHS AND CITADEL—CAIRO AT SUNSET.