Plants of Hardy Growth

HISTORY OF EGYPT: From 330 B.C. to the Present Time By S. Rappoport 1904

I thought I ought to include a historical narrative from an Orientalist frame; here Alexandria is assimilated into the Egyptian past. The book provides an exhaustive account of Cleopatra, Caesar and so on. I included this little piece to show the association of Alexandria with math and astronomy. 

"At a time when vice and luxury claimed the thoughts of all who were not busy in the civil wars, we cannot hope to find the fruits of genius in Alexandria; but the mathematics are plants of a hardy growth, and are not choked so easily as poetry and history. Sosigenes was then the first astronomer in Egypt, and Julius Cæsar was guided by his advice in setting right the Roman Calendar. He was a careful and painstaking mathematician, and, after fixing the length of the year at three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter, he three times changed the beginning of the year, in his doubts as to the day on which the equinox fell; for the astronomer could then only make two observations in a year with a view to learn the time of the equinox, by seeing when the sun shone in the plane of the equator. Photinus the mathematician wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, and was usually thought the author of a mathematical work published in the name of the queen, called the Canon of Cleopatra."