Note 2 — I. Exploration by the Portuguese of the Western Coast of Africa and Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, including a short Sketch of the early History of Portugal.

The old library of the Ptolemies was consumed in Cæsar’s Alexandrian war. Marc Antony gave the whole collection of Pergamus (200,000 volumes) to Cleopatra, as the foundation of the new library of Alexandria. It was kept in apartments of the great temple of Serapis, which was broken down in A.D. 389 by Theophilus, archbishop of Alexandria, “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” The valuable library was pillaged or destroyed. See Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXVIII.