"Ptolemy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Mediterranean. The levels given by a French engineer, who visited Egypt in 1801, during the French invasion, indicated a difference between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean of something like thirty-two feet. It was suggested that if the old canal of Ptolemy were opened again, a current might be established between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, which would not impede steam navigation, and would at the same time scour the canal and enable a perfect channel to be maintained. However, after ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... their original speech, which is classified by Sir G. Grierson as Mundari or Kolarian. He says: "The most southerly forms of Munda speech are those spoken by the Savars and Gadabas of the north-east of Madras. The former have been identified with the Suari of Pliny and the Sabarae of Ptolemy. A wild tribe of the same name is mentioned in Sanskrit literature, even so far back as in late Vedic times, as inhabiting the Deccan, so that the name at least can boast great antiquity." [628] As to the origin of the name ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... acquire influence and consideration. The son took up the same line of business, and engaged in a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt largely in the stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate to have him restored. Rabirius never doubted that he ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... But the majority of men are led by the passions, which the wise alone resist. Consequently, in the majority of cases predictions about human acts, gathered from the observation of heavenly bodies, are fulfilled. Nevertheless, as Ptolemy says (Centiloquium v), "the wise man governs the stars"; which is a though to say that by resisting his passions, he opposes his will, which is free and nowise subject to the movement of the heavens, to such like effects of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... followed him habitually, and recognized him as their master—a certain Philip of Bethsaida; Nathanael, son of Tolmai or Ptolemy, of Cana, perhaps a disciple of the first period;[1] and Matthew, probably the one who was the Xenophon of the infant Christianity. The latter had been a publican, and, as such, doubtless handled the Kalam more easily than ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Hist. del Nuevo Mundo volume 1 page 17. Tiraboschi, Storia della Litteratura.) The most ancient monument we possess of the geography of the New Continent,* is the map of the world by John Ruysch, annexed to a Roman edition of Ptolemy in 1508. (* See the learned researches of M. Walckenaer, in the Bibliographie Universelle volume 6 page 209 article Buckinck. On the maps added to Ptolemy in 1506 we find no trace of the discoveries ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... in Greece he could afford to postpone for a few years the arduous pleasures of the great festival. Herodes Atticus had gone this year, and upon his return brought with him for a visit a group of very distinguished men, including Lucian and Apuleius and the Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy. Paulus was astonished and proud to receive, with Gellius, an invitation to a dinner in ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... first time about A.D. 600. It is supposed to be derived from the Dravidian word for a bow, which is the characteristic weapon of the tribe. It has been suggested that the Bhils are the Pygmies referred to by Ktesias (400 B.C.) and the Phyllitae of Ptolemy (A.D. 150). The Bhils are recognised as the oldest inhabitants of southern Rajputana and parts of Gujarat, and are usually spoken of in conjunction with the Kolis, who inhabit the adjoining tracts of Gujarat. The most probable ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... crime: notwithstanding, when the doctrine of the immortality of the soul first came out of the school of Plato; when it first diffused itself among the Greeks, it caused the greatest ravages; it determined a multitude of men, who were discontented with their condition, to terminate their existence: Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, seeing the effect this doctrine, which at the present day is looked upon as so salutary, produced on the brains of his subjects, prohibited the teaching of it ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... of the author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, who appears to be the first extant writer to employ the name in this form (i.e. assuming Max Mueller's view that he belongs to the 1st century); hence also the Sinae and Thinae of Ptolemy. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... inconsiderable portion of time. The ancient Chaldreans recorded an eclipse to the nearest hour, and the early Alexandrian astronomers thought it superfluous to distinguish between the edge and center of the sun. By the introduction of the astrolabe, Ptolemy, and the later Alexandrian astronomers could determine the places of the heavenly bodies within about ten minutes of arc. Little progress then ensued for thirteen centuries, until Tycho Brahe made the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... pursue with stones and curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed their unpleasant office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissected many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself: yet the public feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continued the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain—as Vesalius proved—to supplement his ignorance of the human frame by describing that of an ape. Dissection ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to them from Babylon. The sexagesimal division is peculiarly Babylonian. Hipparchos, 150 B.C., adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 A.D., gave it wider currency, and the French, when they decimated everything else, respected the dial-plates of our watches, and left them with their sixty ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud citadel of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many sides by men like Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It has been observed that the thinkers who were rebelling against the authority of Aristotle—the most dangerous ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... a corpus scientiae during that age of Greek scholasticism which generally goes by the name of Hellenistic. In its systematized Hellenistic form, it had been received by the Roman world, and had become the culture of the Roman Empire. By writers ranging from Ptolemy to Boethius the body of all known knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects; and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed to the Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitude of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... mines at Labarah, mentioned by Arab authors, which had been abandoned for centuries. In the excavations in the mountain Cailliaud found the lamps, crowbars, ropes, and tools used in working these mines by men in the employ of Ptolemy. Near the quarries the traveller discovered the ruins of a little town, which was probably inhabited by the ancient miners. To prove the reality of his valuable discovery he took back ten pounds' weight of emeralds ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... called wassailing—a relic of the ancient time when wassail was a common word. When I was a boy, among other out-of-the-way pursuits, I took an interest in astrology. The principal work on astrology, from which all the others have been more or less derived, is Ptolemy's 'Tetrabiblos,' and there, pointing out the mysterious influence of one thing upon another, it mentions that the virtues of the magnet may be destroyed by rubbing it with garlic. This curious statement ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Syrian wars of the Dynasty of the Ptolemies. Egypt and Asia were now closely connected, and at several periods during this phase of Egyptian history the Asiatic province came under the control of the Pharaohs. The wars of Ptolemy I. in Syria were conducted on a large scale. In the reign of Ptolemy III. there were three campaigns, and I cannot refrain from quoting a contemporary record of the King's powers if only for the splendour of ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... work that can be regarded as a history of Egypt. The only known attempt in ancient times to write a history of Egypt was that made by Manetho, a skilled scribe and learned man, who, in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (289-246 B.C.), undertook to write a history of the country, which was to be placed in the Great Library at Alexandria. The only portion of this History that has come down to us is the List of Kings, which formed a section of it; this List, in ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... and he That based the world on chance; and next to these, Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech The herb-collector, Dioscorides. Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach Hippocrates and Avicenna's store, The sage that wrote the master commentary, Averois, with Galen and a score Of great physicians. But my pen were weary Depicting all of that majestic plain Splendid with many an ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... of repute supposed that there was not nearly so large a distance as there proved to be, in truth, between Europe and Asia. Thus, in the geography of Ptolemy, which was the standard book at that time, one hundred and thirty-five degrees, a little more than one-third of the earth's circumference, is given to the space between the extreme eastern part of ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... day is all powdered with gold dust, like the court ladies' hair, and is crowned and diapered with roses, and heavy with fabulous scents from the Arabian phoenix's nest. Little Cupids flutter and twitter here and there among the boughs, as in that feast of Adonis which Ptolemy's sister gave in Alexandria, or as in Eisen's vignettes ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... probably based on the currents which, as in Eastern Africa, will carry a ship fifty miles a day out of her course. We first find it in Ptolemy (vii. 2) whose Maniolai Islands, of India extra Gangem, cause iron nails to fly out of ships, the effect of the Lapis Herculeus (Loadstone). Rabelais (v. c. 37) alludes to it and to the vulgar idea of magnetism ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... legends with regard to the existence of a British city on the site now occupied by Chester, the earliest authentic information relating to its history is furnished by the works of Ptolemy and Antoninus. As the Roman station of Deva it was probably founded about A.D. 48 by Ostorius Scapula, and from its advantageous position, both as the key to communication with Ireland and as a bulwark against the hostile tribes of the north, it became a military and commercial centre of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... than a dim surprise at the objects around her. She knew nothing, of course, of the history of Alexandria, once the first city in the world, where Euclid presided over the school in mathematics, and Aristotle studied and gave instruction. Here stood those vast libraries founded by Ptolemy Soter, which were subsequently destroyed, and here St. Mark presided over the church of Africa. Yet all this was unknown to Kitty, who was much more interested in the good dinner set before her at the hotel, with its dessert of fresh dates and great luscious grapes, and the comfortable bed which ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... notwithstanding that the art of observation was still in its infancy, we are indebted to the labours and speculations of ancient Greek philosophers for raising astronomy to the dignity of a science. The complicated but ingenious hypotheses of the Greek Ptolemy prepared the way for the discovery of the elliptic form of the planetary orbits and other astronomical laws by the German Kepler, which again conducted our English Newton to the discovery of the law of gravitation. I am not, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... How did Ptolemy hear of the two lakes which he considered were the sources of the Nile? It is obvious he could not have done so by the channel of the Nile, for the Anthropophagi barred all communication in that direction. Here, however, the route from Zanzibar to the Tanganyika Lake and the Victoria N'yanza, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... of antiquity was built by Sostratus, by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It was a species of tower, erected on a high promontory or rock, on the above mentioned island, then situated about a mile from Alexandria. It was 450 ft. high, divided into several stories, each decreasing in size; the ground story was hexagonal, the sides ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... compound of cynicism and credulity; but I should have fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits, when I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?" ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Minor, which was inexplicable to modern archaeologists until it was perceived that it was following the line of a trade-route much more ancient than the Persian monarchy. [Footnote: Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, chap. i.] The harbor of Berenice, named after the mother of Ptolemy Philadelpnus, was built by him as a place of transit for goods from India which were to be carried from the Red Sea to the Nile. [Footnote: Hunter, Hist. of British India, I., 40.] Roman roads followed ancient lines through Asia Minor ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and if the megalithic monuments of Carnac were then there, would they not have arrested the attention of the great captain? This silence is the more inexplicable as one of the earliest geographers mentions the stone of Iapygia; Ptolemy speaks of a similar stone on the shores of the ocean; Strabo, of a group of dolmens near Cape Cuneus; Quintus Curtius, of an important alignment in Bactriana; Pliny, who mentions a leaning pillar in ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... came under the dominion of this great conqueror, who favored the Jews, and on his death, 323 B.C., it fell to the possession of Laomedon, one of his generals; while Egypt was assigned to Ptolemy Soter, son of Lagus. Between these princes a war soon broke out, and Laomedon was defeated by Nicanor, one of Ptolemy's generals; and Palestine refusing to submit to the king of Egypt, Ptolemy invaded Judaea, besieged Jerusalem, and took it by assault on the Sabbath, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... Pre-Raphaelitism' is rather awkward; not much is gained by dragging in an allusion to Mr. Shorthouse's John Inglesant in a description of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius; and when we are told that the superb Pavilion erected in Alexandria by Ptolemy Philadelphus was a 'sort of glorified Holborn Restaurant,' we must say that the elaborate description of the building given in Athenaeus could have been summed up in a better and a ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... translations of works with regard to other sciences. One of these, astronomy, was a favorite. He made it a particular point to search out and encourage the translation of such books as had not previously been translated from Greek into Arabic. While he provided a translation of Ptolemy he also had translations made ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... no great epic was less due to the disparagement of the form indulged in by Callimachus, chief librarian and literary dictator, than to the inherent temper of society. The prevailing taste was for an arrogant display of rare and costly pageantry. At the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the merchant during the period of the first Queen Arsinoe's conspiracy, and envious foes had done their best to prejudice the King and his sister-wife against Archias. Then the gray-haired hero fearlessly interceded for his friend, and the monarch did not remain deaf to his representations. King Ptolemy was writing the history of the conqueror of the world, and needed the aged comrade of Alexander, the sole survivor who had held a prominent position in the great Macedonian's campaigns. It might be detrimental to his work, on which he set great ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... holy Scriptures; yet were it of man, I could not choose but say, it was the singularest, and superlative piece that hath been extant since the creation; were I a Pagan, I should not refrain the lecture of it, and cannot but commend the judgment of Ptolemy, that thought not his library complete without it. The Alcoran of the Turks (I speak without prejudice) is an ill-composed piece, containing in it vain and ridiculous errors in philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... astronomer of eminence after Hipparchus was PTOLEMY (130 A.D.), who resided at Alexandria. He was skilled as a mathematician and geographer, and also excelled as a musician. His chief discovery was an irregularity of the lunar motion, called the 'evection.' He was also the first to ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... the Kanerkis or the Scythians of India, the rulers of the Punjaub, seem to have adopted the religion of the Magi (Lassen, in J. B. A. S. ix. 456; Prinsep, Note on Historic Researches from Bactrian Coins, 106). As far as Southern India is concerned, the mention of Brahmani Magi in Ptolemy (150) seems to indicate some relation with Persia, but the Kanarese word mag or 'son' ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... to carry out his own magnificent project. That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of young Alexander, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... and his translations of various portions of the Organon of Aristotle, and of the Iagoge, or Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, by Porphyry (c. 233-306). The Geometry of Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.) was translated about 1120 by Adelard of Bath, and the Astronomy (Almagest) of Ptolemy (second century A.D.) was pharaphrased from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona toward the close of the twelfth century, under the title ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... have no arms, no horses, no dwellings; they live on herbs, they clothe themselves in skins, and they sleep on the ground. Their only resources are their arrows, which for the lack of iron are tipped with bone." Strabo and the great geographer, Ptolemy, also mention this curious people. There is evidence that at one time they were spread over large portions ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... thou choose whether thou wilt sip Of *thilke tunne,* that I now shall broach. *that tun* Beware of it, ere thou too nigh approach, For I shall tell examples more than ten: Whoso will not beware by other men, By him shall other men corrected be: These same wordes writeth Ptolemy; Read in his Almagest, and take it there." "Dame, I would pray you, if your will it were," Saide this Pardoner, "as ye began, Tell forth your tale, and spare for no man, And teach us younge men of your practique." "Gladly," ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... can we best account for the mistake relative to the imaginary Bologna edition of Ptolemy's Cosmography in 1462, a copy of which was in the Colbert library? (Leuglet du Fresnoy, Meth. pour etud. l'Hist., iii. 8., a Paris, 1735.) That it was published previously to the famous Mentz Bible of this date is altogether impossible; and was the figure 6 a misprint ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... Persian empire, took possession of Egypt, and annexed it, among the other Persian provinces, to his own dominions. At the division of Alexander's empire, after his death, Egypt fell to one of his generals, named Ptolemy. Ptolemy made it his kingdom, and left it, at his death, to his heirs. A long line of sovereigns succeeded him, known in history as the dynasty of the Ptolemies—Greek princes, reigning over an Egyptian realm. Cleopatra was the daughter of the ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... Ptolemy Philopator of Egypt is said to have built a gigantic ship with no less than forty tiers of oars, one above the other! She was managed by 4000 men, besides whom there were 2850 combatants; she had four rudders and a double prow. Her stern ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... banded themselves together in France, with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, "The Pleiades," was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek writers, that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course, the implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The individual name by which the Pleiades of the sixteenth century may best be remembered is that of Ronsard the poet, associated ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... these islands by one Iamboule, a Greek, who went to them (to Sumatra at least), and who wrote afterward the relation of his voyage. He gave therein detailed information of the number of the islands, of their inhabitants, of their writing, navigation, etc. Ptolemy mentions three islands in his geography, which are called Sindae in the Latin text. They are inhabited by the Aginnatai. Mercator interprets those islands as Celebes, Gilolo, and Amboina. Ptolemy ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... student of Greek philosophy, and formed the plan of translating all of Plato and Aristotle and reconciling their philosophies. This work he never completed. He wrote a treatise on music which was used as a text-book as late as the present century; and he translated the works of Ptolemy on astronomy, of Nicomachus on arithmetic, of Euclid on geometry, and of Archimedes on mechanics. His great work in this line was a translation of Aristotle, which he supplemented by a commentary in thirty books. Among ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... arms, and for the fight prepar'd. In Agamemnon then no trace was seen Of laggard sloth, no shrinking from the fight, But full of ardour to the field he rush'd. He left his horses and brass-mounted car (The champing horses by Eurymedon, The son of Ptolemy, Peiraeus' son, Were held aloof), but with repeated charge Still to be near at hand, when faint with toil His limbs should fail him marshalling his host. Himself on foot the warrior ranks array'd; With cheering words addressing whom he found With zeal ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... abbreviations in writing) it will be found that the exposition of corresponding matters in modern elementary textbooks generally takes up, not less, but more space. And, to say nothing of the perfect finish of Archimedes's treatises, we shall find in Heron, Ptolemy and Pappus veritable models of concise statement. The purely geometrical proof by Heron of the formula for the area of a triangle, Δ{D}√{s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c)}, and the geometrical propositions in Book I of Ptolemy's ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the determination of the period of recurrence, but on the true projection also of the track of the Sun's shadow along a particular line over the surface of the earth—may be inferred from our finding that in the astronomical canon of Ptolemy, which was compiled from the Chaldean registers, the observations of the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... and is derived from the same source; for, instead of Hareflot and Huneflot, some old records have Hareflou and Huneflou, and some others Barfleu, terms approaching flevus, which is also called by Ptolemy, fleus, and by Mela, fletio. It is highly improbable, that these two last terms should have been coined subsequently to the time of the Romans becoming masters of Gaul, and it is equally unlikely that the Saxon fleoten should be derived from the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... herein of such as make profession in cosmography, Ptolemy, the father of geography, and his eldest children, will answer by their maps with a negative, concluding most of the sea within the land, and making an end of the world northward, near the 63rd degree. The same opinion, when learning chiefly flourished, was received in the ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great, who left it under the rule of the Ptolemies. The next century after the Alexandrian age the philosophy and literature of Athens was transferred to Alexandria. The Alexandrian library, completed by Ptolemy Philadelphus, in the third century before Christ, was formed for the most part of Greek books and it also had Greek librarians; so that in the learning and philosophy of Alexandria at this time, the Eastern and Western systems were combined. During the first century of the Christian era Egypt ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... object of his expedition, that they might know where to rendezvous in case of separation. Setting sail from Goa on the 18th of February 1513, the armament arrived safe at Aden. This city, called Modocan by Ptolemy, is situated on the coast of Yemen or Arabia Felix, in lat. 12 deg. 45' N. near the mouth of the Red Sea, and looks beautiful and strong from the sea, being rich and populous owing to the resort of many nations for trade. But Immediately ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... like that of a river, and we filled all our empty casks with it. Having returned to our ships, we raised anchor and set sail, turning our prows southwardly, as it was my intention to see whether I could sail around a point of land which Ptolemy calls the Cape of Cattegara, which is near the Great Bay. In my opinion it was not far from it, according to the degrees of latitude and longitude, which will be stated hereafter. Sailing in a southerly direction along the coast, we saw two large rivers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... philosopher to understand how the winds manage to cross each other, as Lieut. Maury supposes them to do, at the equator and the tropics, without getting into "entangling alliances." If this hypothesis were advanced, not as a physical explanation of the phenomena, but, like the epicycles and eccentrics of Ptolemy, "to save the appearances," its ingenuity would be greatly to its author's credit; but, like the epicycles and eccentrics, though it represents the phenomena well enough, it contradicts laws of motion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... attack them in Egypt, which she subdued and added to her territories, together with a part of Armenia and Asia Minor. Thus her dominions extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, and over all those vast and fertile countries formerly governed by Ptolemy and Seleucus. Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, and other cities famed in history, were included in her empire, but she fixed her residence at Palmyra, and in an interval of peace she turned her attention to the further adornment of her magnificent ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... long duration; for there is not the mention of a single city in Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote on the wars of the Romans in Germany. The names of places in Ptolemy (ii. 11) are not, therefore, those of cities, but of scattered villages. The Germans had not even what we should call towns, notwithstanding Caesar asserts ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... hold communion." The School of Alexandria became, after the decay of Greek culture, the centre of learning for the world, and when the Empire of Alexander the Great was subdivided, the Egyptian share fell to the first Ptolemy, who, under the direction of Aristotle, founded the Alexandrian Library, containing at first fifty thousand, and finally seven hundred thousand volumes. Every student who came to the University of Alexandria, and possessed a book of which there was not a ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... related that when Ptolemy Philadelphus about 260 years before Christ, resolved to have the Hebrew Scriptures translated into Greek, for the purpose of placing them in his far-famed library, he despatched messengers to Eleazar, the High Priest of the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... the sea. A dish, however, is generally uniform in shape—Africa is not. For instance, we find in its centre a high group of hills surrounding the head of the Tanganyika Lake, composed chiefly of argillaceous sandstones which I suppose to be the Lunae Montes of Ptolemy, or the Soma Giri of the ancient Hindus. Further, instead of a rim at the northern end, the country shelves down from the equator to the Mediterranean Sea; and on the general surface of the interior plateau ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... unexpected change of fortune became motionless and died. The famous Forquet died on being told that Louis XIV. had restored him to his liberty. It is also related of Diodorus Chronos, who was considered as the most subtle logician of the time of Ptolemy Soter, that Stilbo one day in the presence of the king, proposed a question to him, to which he was unable to reply. The king, willing to cover him with shame, pronounced only one part of his name, and called him ovos, ass, instead of Chronos. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... be observed, that D'Anville, following Ptolemy and other writers whom he considers as the best informed on the internal geography of Africa, is satisfied that there are two considerable rivers, the Niger and the Gir; both of which are said to terminate ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... and henceforth know, It is not Caesar's natural vice to hate Our great competitor. From Alexandria This is the news:—he fishes, drinks, and wastes The lamps of night in revel: is not more manlike Than Cleopatra;, nor the queen of Ptolemy More womanly than he: hardly gave audience, or Vouchsaf'd to think he had partners: you shall find there A man who is the abstract of all faults That all ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... one uniform sound; as in pin, slipper; except in cupboard, clapboard, where it has the sound of b. It is mute in psalm, Ptolemy, tempt, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... commerce in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. As early as the seventh century before Christ these beacon-fires were mentioned in writings. In the third century before the Christian era a tower said to be of a great height was built on a small island near Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II. The tower was named Pharos, which is the origin of the term "pharology" applied to the science of lighthouse construction. Caesar, who visited Alexandria two centuries later, described the Pharos as a "tower of great height, of wonderful construction." Fire was kept ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... theories make the same mistake regarding Soul 122:30 and body that Ptolemy made regarding the solar system. They insist that soul is in body and mind therefore tribu- tary to matter. Astronomical science has destroyed the 123:1 false theory as to the relations of the celestial bodies, and Christian Science will ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... shouldst know Ptolemy and the Almagest,' said the hermit smiling, 'to understand the circuits of those wandering ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Antioch, my city! Queen of the East! my solace, my delight! The dowry of my sister Cleopatra When she was wed to Ptolemy, and now Won back and made more wonderful by me! I love thee, and I long to be once more Among the players and the dancing women Within thy gates, and bathe in the Orontes, Thy river and mine. O Jason, my High-Priest, For ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 1529—call it "Y de Pinos," and on the globe of Ulpius, to which the year 1542 is assigned, "de Pinos" is clearly marked. Bellero's map, 1550, has an island "de pinolas." Naturally, map-makers were slow to adopt new names, and in the numerous editions of Ptolemy the label St Iago was retained almost to the end of the century.{3} On the Agnese map there are two islands, one named "S. Tiago," the other "pinos," which introduced a new confusion, though he was not followed by most geographers until Wytfliet, 1597, gave both ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... makes it signify "balance or lines (Pers. 'Astur') of the sun," which is called "Lab" as in the case of wicked Queen Lab (The Nights, vol. vii. 296). According to him the Astrolabe was suggested to Ptolemy by an armillary sphere which had accidentally been flattened by the hoof of his beast: this is beginning late in the day, the instrument was known to the ancient Assyrians. Chardin (Voyages ii. 149) carefully describes the Persian ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... stampeded; still, it was decked all over with gold, had purple housings and a richly jewelled bridle, the spoil of Darius' or Cambyses' treasury, if not of Cyrus' own. As for the man, a few laughed at him, but most shrank as from a monster. Ptolemy realized that the show was a failure, and the Egyptians proof against mere novelty, preferring harmony and beauty. So he withdrew and ceased to prize them; the camel died forgotten, and the parti-coloured ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Ptolemy and to Plato, as well as to Job. All ages of mankind must have watched and wondered, pondering over the unsolved problems. When the First Great Cause projected all these whirling fire-mists into illimitable space with all the laws of physics, ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... may be permitted to refer to the older cartography of New Mexico in general. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century these maps are very defective and incomplete. It is almost as if the Ptolemy of 1548 had served as a basis for them. Even the large and beautiful globe constructed at St. Gall in Switzerland in 1595, and now in the Swiss National Museum at Zuerich, places Tiguex near the Pacific coast. It is through the work of Benavides that more correct ideas of New Mexican geography ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... Chaldean Zodiac, "counsellors" or "judges," which rose and set with it. Astrology was brought into great prominence by the visit of the magi, the zodiacal constellation Virgo, the "woman with a child," ruling Palestine, in which country Bethlehem is situated. The great astronomer and astrologer, Ptolemy, judged the character of countries from the signs ruling them, as to this day ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... "Rata" of Ptolemy, was near the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris, on the Arabian side of the river. It was one of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... distance, made a conjectural chart embodying the results of his readings of Aristotle, Strabo, and Ptolemy, of his conversations during many years with Oriental travellers, and his own observations. He sent this chart to Columbus; the latter adopted it as his guide, and by means of it, faulty as it was, achieved his great "discovery." Whose, then, is the merit of this achievement? ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... as he breathed a sigh of relief, "what a glorious day! We've beat 'em! Won't the Directory be glad? M. Barras will be more M. Barrassed than ever." Then, turning and tapping on the door of the massive pile, he whispered, softly: "Ah! Ptolemy, my man, it's a pity you've no windows in this tomb. You'd have seen a pretty sight this day. Kleber," he added, turning to that general, "do you know why Ptolemy inside this pyramid and I ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... privilege of a lasting name can be conferred more easily than by books. A book made renders succession to the author; for as long as the book exists, the author, remaining immortal, can not perish; as Ptolemy witnesseth; in the prolog of his Almagest,[4] he (he says) is not dead, who gave ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... cultivated wherever their direct domination was established. The great astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians, like the originators or defenders of the great metaphysical systems, were mostly Orientals. Ptolemy and Plotinus were Egyptians, Porphyry and Iamblichus, Syrians, Dioscorides and Galen, Asiatics. All branches of learning were affected by the spirit of the Orient. The clearest minds accepted the chimeras of astrology ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... years ago—for what is time?—I was the authorised magician at the Court of Ptolemy Patriarchus. I had a rival—the noted witch Theodolite. In an evil hour she won me by a show of false affection, and, taking advantage of my passion, mummified me alive. To this I owe my remarkable state of preservation at an advanced age. Tres ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... been disposed of by sinking in springs or water-courses, by throwing into the sea, or by setting afloat in canoes. Among the nations of antiquity the practice was not uncommon, for we are informed that the Ichthyophagi, or fish-eaters, mentioned by Ptolemy, living in a region bordering on the Persian Gulf, invariably committed their dead to the sea, thus repaying the obligations they had incurred to its inhabitants. The Lotophagians did the same, and ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... that the sun approaches nearer and nearer, and therefore by ever-lessening circles reaches the tropics and the equator every year a little sooner. They measure months by the course of the moon, years by that of the sun. They praise Ptolemy, admire Copernicus, but place Aristarchus and Philolaus before him. They take great pains in endeavoring to understand the construction of the world, and whether or not it will perish, and at what time. They believe that the ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... notices tell us something of the history of Muttra. It was a great Buddhist and Jain centre, as the statues and viharas found there attest. Ptolemy calls it the city of the gods. Fa-Hsien (400 A.D.) describes it as Buddhist, but that faith was declining at the time of Hsuean Chuang's visit (c. 630 A.D.). The sculptural remains also indicate the presence of Graeco-Bactrian influence. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... years after the death of the latter, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek by the order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the Egyptian sovereign of Palestine, making the famous Septuagint—the name probably referring to seventy-two ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... countries. Itzenplitz, the name of a family once of great consequence in the Mark of Brandenburg is ultra-Wendish. It will, therefore, excite no wonder that we find, even in Tacitus, Veneti along their coasts and Ptolemy, who wrote about a century and a half later than Strabo or Livy, seems to have improved the terminology of the ancients in the interval; for, speaking of the Sarmatian tribes, he calls these Veneti [Greek: Ouenedai par ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... I could curs my name of Ptolemy! It is so long, it asks an hour to write it, By Heaven! I'll change it into Jove or Mars! Or any other civil monosyllable, That will not tire my ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... liar of the first magnitude," Judith said. "It has misled man ever since he first climbed down from the trees. It was common sense that inspired Ptolemy's theory of cosmogony. It was common sense that inspired ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... of the researches of Copernicus, the orthodox scientific creed averred that the earth was stationary, and that the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies were real movements. Ptolemy had laid down this doctrine fourteen hundred years before. In his theory this huge error was associated with so much important truth, and the whole presented such a coherent scheme for the explanation of the heavenly movements, that the Ptolemaic theory was not seriously questioned until the great ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... to say that, if it be conferred with the greatness of the celestial sphere, it hath no bigness at all. And of this so small a region in the world only the fourth part is known to be inhabited by living creatures known to us, as Ptolemy[117] proveth. From which fourth part, if thou takest away in imagination the seas, the marsh grounds, and all other desert places, there will scarcely be left any room at all for men to inhabit. Wherefore, enclosed and shut up in this smallest point of that other point, do you think ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... in reading of how a great tower full of knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo saw? And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more it looks like truth, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... turrets, Tycho set Statues with golden verses in the praise Of famous men, the bearers of the torch, From Ptolemy to the new Copernicus. Then, in that storm-proof mountain of the stars, He set in all their splendour of new-made brass His armouries for the assault of heaven,— Circles in azimuth, armillary spheres, Revolving zodiacs with great brazen rings; Quadrants of solid brass, ten cubits broad, Brass ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... World, which is in the second of the Books on Natural History. In fact, he excuses himself for this in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics, where he clearly proves himself to have followed also another opinion where he was obliged to speak of Astrology. Ptolemy, then, perceiving that the eighth sphere is moved by many movements, seeing its circle to depart from the right circle, which turns from East to West, constrained by the principles of Philosophy, which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... Don Quixote, "for of the three hundred and sixty degrees that this terraqueous globe contains, as computed by Ptolemy, the greatest cosmographer known, we shall have traveled one-half when we come to the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... they trench upon it; mounting in steeper curves, till the steepness baffles them, and their parallel threads show like the striae of waves pausing on the curl. The peculiar place of which these are some of the features is 'Mai-Dun,' 'The Castle of the Great Hill,' said to be the Dunium of Ptolemy, the capital of the Durotriges, which eventually came into Roman occupation, and was finally deserted on their withdrawal from ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers...." Richard De Bury, Philobiblon, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... intellectual energy is displayed in the discussions; but to see a conclave of learned professors devoting their time to the examination and discussion of Aristotle's writings is about as edifying as to see a geographical society devoting its time to discussing the geography of Ptolemy. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... one hand, there appeared works on universal history by Greek polymaths, such as Hecataeus of Abdera, Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, and Ptolemy, the comrade of Alexander; and, on the other hand, a number of national histories were written, also in Greek, but by Hellenized natives, such as the Chaldaica of Berosus, the Aegyptiaca of Manetho, and the Phoenician chronicles of Dius and Menander. The ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... familiar with Correo, her sister's husband, also a distinguished navigator. The islanders fully believed in the existence of lands in the western Atlantic. West winds had brought to them strange woods curiously carved, huge cane-brakes like those of India described by Ptolemy, peculiarly fashioned canoes, and corpses with skin of a hue unknown to Europe ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... reward. And so also has the patient and humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate reverence on the great men of old time—on Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny, and many another honourable man who, walking in great darkness, sought a ray of light, and did not seek in vain,—as integral parts of that golden chain of which he is but one link more; as scientific forefathers, without whose ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... knowledge of the true God, are more unreliable still. Plato lived in the fourth century before Christ (born B.C. 430), and there is no good evidence of the existence of a Greek version of the Old Testament before that of "the Seventy" (Septuagint), made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, B.C. 270. Jeremiah, the prophet of Israel, lived two centuries before Plato; consequently any personal intercourse between the two was simply impossible. Greek philosophy was unquestionably ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to do. A team you need, admittedly, but not so much as the team needs you. Remember Alexander? He had a team starting off with Aristotle for a brain-trust, and Parmenion, one of the greatest generals of all time for his right-hand man. Then he had a group of field men such as Ptolemy, Antipater, Antigonus and Seleucus—not to be rivaled until Napoleon built his team, two thousand years later. And what happened to this ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... by the sun and the moon, by the planets and the comets, upon the tablets of the sky? Yet, without the ellipse, without the conic sections of Plato and Apollonius, astronomy would have been to this day a sealed science, and the labors of Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Tycho, and Copernicus would have waited in vain for the genius of Kepler and of Newton to educe divine order from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... nevertheless to have read, that Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, one day, amongst the many spoils and booties which by his victories he had acquired, presenting to the Egyptians, in the open view of the people, a Bactrian camel all black, and a party-coloured slave, in such sort as that the one ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 600. Mommsen says, "they were veritably emigrants. This Roman Coblentz presented a pitiful spectacle of the high pretensions and paltry performances of the grandees of Rome." (Vol. iv., p. 397.) Almost all the Consulars were with Pompeius. (5) By the will of Ptolemy Auletes, Cleopatra had been appointed joint sovereign of Egypt with her young brother. Lucan means that Caesar would have killed Pompeius if young Ptolemy had not done so. She lost her hare of the kingdom, and Caesar was clear of the crime. ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... right in saying that cartography was no longer at its height as a science. In reality, Sanson had blindly followed the longitudes of Ptolemy, without taking any note of astronomical observations. His sons and grandsons had simply re-edited his maps as they were completed, and other geographers followed the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... according to him, was a fixed body; it possessed neither rotation round an axis nor translation through space, but remained constantly at rest in what he supposed to be the centre of the universe. According to Ptolemy's theory the sun and the moon moved in circular orbits around the earth in the centre. The explanation of the movements of the planets he found to be more complicated, because it was necessary to account for the fact that a planet sometimes advanced and that it sometimes ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Thans, p. 231. Had the dunes of the Netherlandish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled the moving sand-hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they could have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo; and the absolute silence of Caesar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopaedic Pliny, respecting them, would be not less inexplicable.] The history of the dunes of Michigan, so far as I have been able to learn from my own observation, or that of others, is the same. Thirty years ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... unhappy Prose was mad! Epics he wrote and scores of rebuses, All as neat as old Turnebus's; Eggs and altars, cyclopaedias, Grammars, prayer-books—oh! 'twere tedious, Did I but tell thee half, to follow me: Not the scribbling bard of Ptolemy, No—nor the hoary Trismegistus, (Whose writings all, thank heaven! have missed us,) E'er filled with lumber such a wareroom ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... PTOLEMY.—It will be observed that the Greek geographer regarded the Indian Ocean as a landlocked body of water, while he appears to have some knowledge of the so ces of the Nile. The general tendency of the map is to extend Asia very much to the east, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... famous ode, appears to rest on the sole authority of Cleitarchus, one of the least trustworthy of the historians of Alexander, and is in all probability a mere fable." After the death of Alexander, Thais became the wife of Ptolemy Lagus. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... back with a force sufficient to retrieve their affairs. Others were of opinion it was proper to apply to Africa, and to Juba in particular. But Theophanes of Lesbos observed it was madness to leave Egypt, which was distant but three days' sail. Besides, Ptolemy, who was growing towards manhood, had particular obligations to Pompey on his father's account. As so it was determined that they should seek for refuge in Egypt. Being informed that Ptolemy was with his army at Pelusium, where he was engaged in ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... England. A great protruding backbone of chalk rocks projects far into the North Sea at Flamborough Head, and makes one of the most prominent landmarks on all that rugged, iron-bound coast. This is the Ocellum Promontorium of Ptolemy, and its lighthouse is three hundred and thirty feet above the sea, while far away over the waters the view is superb. From Flamborough Head northward beyond Whitby the coast-line is a succession of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... fables, and on their unfaithful copies Strabo founded many of his assertions. According to M. Gosselin, the itineraries of Hanno, of Scylax, Polybius, Statius, Sebosus, and Juba; the recitals of Plato, of Aristotle, of Pliny, of Plutarch, and the tables of Ptolemy, all bring us to the same results, and, notwithstanding their apparent contradictions, fix the limit of southern navigation about the neighborhood of Cape Non, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... day; for what was Pompey's Pillar to me while I remained ignorant of my friends' adventures? As I discoursed (more or less) learnedly about Diocletian, and Ptolemy's plot to drown Pompey in the Nile, something inside was asking, "Has Anthony fallen in love with Monny Gilder?" "What scrapes has that blessed girl got into?" "Has anything happened to worry Biddy?" Even that nameless ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest." For over fourteen centuries it was the textbook for the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... scanty and questionable. Had the native history of Berossus survived, this would not have been the case; all that is known of the Chaldaean historian's work, however, is derived from quotations in Josephus, Ptolemy, Eusebius and the Syncellus. The authenticity of his list of 10 antediluvian kings who reigned for 120 sari or 432,000 years, has been partially confirmed by the inscriptions; but his 8 postdiluvian dynasties are difficult to reconcile with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or no, and when King Ptolemy had sent him threescore talents for his piece, after it was finished, he neither would accept the money nor part with his work; what and how great satisfactions may we then suppose to have been reaped from geometry and astronomy by Euclid when he wrote his Dioptrics, by Philippus when he had ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... gravity labouring under such strange blindness and delusion. Will you place the brief, the modern, and, as I may say, the vernacular name of Isaac Newton in opposition to the grave and sonorous authorities of Dariot, Bonatus, Ptolemy, Haly, Eztler, Dieterick, Naibob, Harfurt, Zael, Taustettor, Agrippa, Duretus, Maginus, Origen, and Argol? Do not Christians and Heathens, and Jews and Gentiles, and poets and philosophers, unite in ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that is undoubtedly a development of the very art practised in the days of Ptolemy, Rameses, and Cleopatra. They do not use their patchwork to adorn quilts, since these are unknown in the warm Nile valley, but as covers for cushions, panels for screens, and decorations suitable for wall hangings. Generally but ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... forgetful of the fact that antiquity is the youth of the world, still follow Aristotle as their guide in philosophy and metaphysics, and Ptolemy in geography! Missionaries have succeeded in introducing modern text books into some of the schools, but owing to the peculiar system of Turkish education, the result has not been so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... vicar of Thornton a profound divine, but absolutely the most polite person for nativities in that age, strictly adhering to Ptolemy, which he well understood; he had a hand in composing Sir Christopher Heydon's defence of judicial astrology, being that time his chaplain; he was so given over to tobacco and drink, that when he had no tobacco, he would cut the bell-ropes ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... account of snow. Then there is a land inhabited by man-eating Scythians, then deserts, then Scythians again, then deserts with wild animals to a mountain ridge rising out of the sea, which is called Tabin. The first people that are known beyond this are the Seri. PTOLEMY and his successors again supposed, though perhaps not ignorant of the old statement that Africa had been circumnavigated under Pharaoh Necho, that the Indian Ocean was an inland sea, everywhere surrounded by land, which united southern Africa ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... process of mapping a sphere onto a plane surface by stereographic projection was introduced by Hipparchus and had much influence on astronomical techniques and instruments thereafter. In particular, by the time of Ptolemy (ca. A.D. 120) it had led to the successive inventions of the anaphoric clock and of the planispheric astrolabe.[12] Both these devices consist of a pair of stereographic projections, one of the celestial sphere with ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... for Palestine to have belonged to Syria, but the Greek King of Egypt, whose name was Ptolemy Lagos, contrived to secure it. He entered Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day, when the Jews thought it wrong to fight, and so he gained the city without a blow; but this was no great misfortune to them, for the first Ptolemies ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs; and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was possibly suggested by the spurred circle which was used for ten.[199] It has also been thought that the omicron used by Ptolemy in his Almagest, to mark accidental blanks in the sexagesimal system which he employed, may have influenced the Indian writers.[200] This symbol was used quite generally in Europe and Asia, and the Arabic astronomer Al-Batt[a]n[i][201] ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years. In the early part of the second century Ptolemy, the geographer, speaks of it as a city of the Kentish people; but Mr. Craik very ingeniously conjectures that the Greek writer took his information from Phoenician works descriptive of Britain, written before even the invasion of Caesar. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Brethren), which were names of the Ptolemies: or from their success, as Eudaemon (the Fortunate), a name given to the second king of the race of Battus. Some princes have even had names given them in jest, as Antigonus was called Doson (the Promiser), and Ptolemy Lathyrus ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... by the fortifications of Valentinian; but the sea-coast of Gaul and Britain was exposed to the depredations of the Saxons. That celebrated name, in which we have a dear and domestic interest, escaped the notice of Tacitus; and in the maps of Ptolemy, it faintly marks the narrow neck of the Cimbric peninsula, and three small islands towards the mouth of the Elbe. This contracted territory, the present duchy of Sleswig, or perhaps of Holstein, was incapable of pouring forth the inexhaustible ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... "Successors," the name given to the Macedonian generals who fought for the empire of Alexander after his death in 323 B.C. The name includes Antigonus and his son Demetrius Poliorcetes, Antipater and his son Cassander, Seleucus, Ptolemy, Eumenes and Lysimachus. The kingdoms into which the Macedonian empire was divided under these rulers are known as Hellenistic. The chief were Asia Minor and Syria under the SELEUCID DYNASTY (q.v.), Egypt under the PTOLEMIES (q.v.), Macedonia under the successors ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... birth the five great roads from Tara to all parts of Ireland were completed: one of them from Dublin is still used. Connaught is said to have been named after him, but this is scarcely consonant with Joyce's identification with Ptolemy's Nagnatai (Irish Local Names, i. 75). But there can be little doubt of Conn's existence as a powerful ruler in Ireland in the second century. The historic existence of Connla seems also to be authenticated by ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of gods and demigods, whose members were to be united by marriage among themselves in order not to pollute the celestial purity of their blood. A fraternal and divine pair were to rule at Rome, like another Arsinoe and Ptolemy, whom the Alexandrian throngs had worshiped on the banks of the Nile. The idea had already matured in his mind at the end of the year 37, and among his three sisters he had already chosen Drusilla to be his wife. This is proved ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... say that Ptolemy Philadelphus, the king of Egypt of that time, having heard the Jews speak of their Book, and wishing to have a copy of it to place in his great library, sent all the way to Jerusalem for seventy learned scribes who should translate the Book ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, a Pericles, or an Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that when a man neglects a summons his door is removed to the royal court-yard on the first day; on the second, it is confiscated. The door is a valuable and venerable article in this part of Africa. According to Bruce, Ptolemy Euergetes engraved it upon the Axum Obelisk for the benefit of his newly conquered AEthiopian subjects, to whom ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... of the science of anatomy, Erasistratus and Herophilus, who lived in the age of Ptolemy Soter, taught that the brain was the seat of sensation and intellect, and that there was therein a certain degree of localization of function. Galen later taught that the brain is the seat of the soul ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... transition, from those which do little more than take in just a little of the crisp floweriness of the gothic, like some of the Mentelin or quasi-Mentelin ones (which, indeed, are models of beautiful simplicity), or say like the letter of the Ulm Ptolemy, of which it is difficult to say whether it is gothic or roman, to the splendid Mainz type, of which, I suppose, the finest specimen is the Schoeffer Bible of 1462, which is almost wholly gothic. This gives us a wide field for variety, I think, so I make the suggestion to you, ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... the dogmas of the Church were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous physical notions. Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological constructions of the Middle Ages. The Church, adopting ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... old Graphaeus, secretary of the city of Antwerp, and the author of several well written Latin works. The young man, on whose shoulder he leans, is his son, Alexander, who is also very learned. Before him is seated Abraham Ortelius, the great geographer, who is regarded as the Ptolemy of his age. Beside Ortelius is his friend and fellow-laborer Gerard, also a learned geographer, and one of the luminaries of the day. The only one whose dress indicates his Italian birth is Louis Guicciardini, a Florentine gentleman, who is here for the purpose of collecting ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... and turquoise matrix. But its beauty was chiefly suggestive. There were gorgeous sunsets—poetry there, but more poetry still in the wonderful mirages. Why, here, hung above the earth, were scenes from every age: Cleopatra's galleys, Alexander's legions, the pomp of the Mamelukes, Ptolemy and Pompey, Napoleon and Gordon—their times and deeds were all pictured here. Perhaps the spirit world has its "movies," and only here in the desert mirage is the "screen" of stuff that can be seen with ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... Ekkjals-bakki is clearly Oykel's Bank, the high bank or [Greek: ochthe hypsele] of Ptolemy. "Ochill" is the same word. As for Bakke, see Coldbackie and Hysbackie ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... inscriptions are no longer legible, and great part of its figures are gone. Selvatico states them as follows: Solomon, the wise; Priscian, the grammarian; Aristotle, the logician; Tully, the orator; Pythagoras, the philosopher; Archimedes, the mechanic; Orpheus, the musician; Ptolemy, the astronomer. The fragments actually remaining ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... intelligent; with large almond-shaped eyes, a Grecian nose, teeth like pearls, and a hand like your own, countess—a fit hand to hold a scepter. See, here is a diamond which she gave me, and which she had had from her brother Ptolemy; she wore ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... garden is one of the most extensive in Great Britain. Dublin Castle is near the centre of the city, on slightly elevated ground, containing an armory, a chapel, and various government offices. This city claims great antiquity, having existed as a capital since the days of Ptolemy. It was for centuries held by the Danes; in 1169 it was taken by the English under Strongbow, whose remains lie ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou |
