Page:The Hunterian oration, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, on the fourteenth day of February, 1821 (electronic resource) (IA b21483851).pdf/27

 at Alexandria, a frightful and blighting gloom overspread the states of Asia and of Europe. The temple of knowledge, as it were, being thus thrown down, its disgregated fragments were afterward only to be found in situations remote from each other; their connection dissolved, their symmetry defaced, and their finest features at length overgrown and choked up, by the rank and noxious weeds of credulity and imposture.

It will therefore avail us but little to look into the writings of those authors, which the dark ages that followed occasionally produced. For however creditable their works might have been to their respective compilers, they now appear to us, as chiefly characterised by