The mathematicians and men of science connected, more or less closely, with Alexandria in the third century before Christ were as able as any of the Greeks of previous centuries, and did work of equal importance. But they were not, like their predecessors, men who took all learning as their province, and propounded universal philosophies; they were specialists in the modern sense. Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes and Appollonius, were content to be mathematicians; in philosophy they did not aspire to originality.p. 223.

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