This destruction cannot, however, be reckoned as all loss;
for had not the "cleansing fires" removed mountains of rubbish from
our midst, strong destructive measures would have become a necessity
from sheer want of space in which to store so many volumes.
Before the invention of Printing, books were comparatively scarce;
and, knowing as we do, how very difficult it is, even after
the steam-press has been working for half a century, to make
a collection of half a million books, we are forced to receive
with great incredulity the accounts in old writers of the wonderful
extent of ancient libraries.
The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things, accepts without
questioning the fables told upon this subject.No doubt the libraries of
MSS. collected generation after generation by the Egyptian Ptolemies
became, in the course of time, the most extensive ever then known; and
were famous throughout the world for the costliness of their ornamentation,
and importance of their untold contents. Two of these were at Alexandria,
the larger of which was in the quarter called Bruchium. These volumes,
like all manuscripts of those early ages, were written on sheets of
parchment, having a wooden roller at each end so that the reader needed
only to unroll a portion at a time.
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