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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: It was as a mechanician, rather than as an astronomer, that he gained
his reputation. The stories of his Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship
which he built for Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane,
his war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical arrangement of mirrors,
by which he set fire to ships in the harbour--all these, like the story
of his detecting the alloy in Hiero's crown, while he himself was in the
bath, and running home undressed shouting [Greek text: eureeka]--all
these are schoolboys' tales. To the thoughtful person it is the method
of the man which constitutes his real greatness, that power of insight
by which he solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever and
of hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all static and
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