PHYSICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES. 79

notions on the part of him who urges it, and willhardly he maintained by any one who has acquired justviews of the relative importance of the different branchesof philosophical speculation, and the intimate connectionand dependence which subsists between them. Andthat, of such abstract speculations, those relating tothe singular properties of curve lines arising as logicalconsequences out of the simplest constructions, areamong the most beautiful, is a point of taste, for thejustness of which we can only appeal to the convictionsof every one who will go through the necessary steps toenable him to judge.

The fifth century of the Christian era witnessed thealmost total extinction of the sciences in Alexandria.Some students, indeed, were to be found, who continuedto keep alive the memory of the achievements of aformer age. But the circumstances of the times wereunfavourable to the extension of physical research, andat length the invasion of the Saracens, and the wantondestruction of that great repository in which the trea-sures of literature had been accumulating at Alexandriafor nine centuries (a. d. 640), struck the final blow ;and from that period we may date the extinction ofGreek philosophy.

In Rome , we have already seen that the little taste everevinced for the physical sciences had long before de-clined. The writings of the philosophers were com-posed exclusively in the Greek language. The greatdivision of the empire under the sons of Theodosius placed so broad a line of separation between the easternand western portions of it, that Greek literature wasnow no longer cultivated in Rome . Thus the recordsof science ceased to he accessible to the nations of theWest ; while the troubles in which this division of theempire was now involved, the continual wars, andirruptions of the Gothic tribes in its later ages, whollyprevented any attempts to raise an indigenous growthof science, even had the germs of it existed in thegenius of the people.