In the shops and streets of Alexandria there were thousands of Jews who had forgotten the God that had made his habitation behind the veil of the temple.
Tradition, revelation, time, all had lost their influence.

The traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing away.

And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral are forms of faith.
But the Ptolemies also recognized that there is something more durable than forms of faith, which, like the organic forms of geological ages, once gone, are clean gone forever, and have no restoration, no return.
They recognized that within this world of transient delusions and unrealities there is a world of eternal truth.
That world is not to be discovered through the vain traditions that have brought down to us the opinions of men who lived in the morning of civilization, nor in the dreams of mystics who thought that they were inspired.

It is to be discovered by the investigations of geometry, and by the practical interrogation of Nature.

These confer on humanity solid, and innumerable, and inestimable blessings.
The day will never come when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied; no one henceforth will call in question the globular shape of the earth, as recognized by Eratosthenes; the world will not permit the great physical inventions and discoveries made in Alexandria and Syracuse to be forgotten.