no guile, where the unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so
many shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the
sacrifice of Jephthah or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is
slain by a father's sword. How many labours of the famous
Hercules shall we suppose then perished, who because of his
knowledge of astronomy is said to have sustained the heaven on
his unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for the second time
cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus
learnt not from man or through man but received by divine
inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the servant of unclean
spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect of
Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and
finally, what the first Adam taught his children of the things to
come, which he had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book
of eternity, are believed to have perished in those horrid
flames. The religion of the Egyptians, which the book of the
Perfect Word so commends; the excellent polity of the older
Athens, which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of
Greece; the charms of the Chaldaeans; the observations of the
Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the architecture
of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic arts of
Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the
problems of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the
antidotes of Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of
Parnassus; the oracles of Apollo; the argonautics of Jason; the
stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite other secrets of science
are believed to have perished at the time of this conflagration.

Nay, Aristotle would not have missed the quadrature of the
circle, if only baleful conflicts had spared the books of the