CHAPTER XXVIII

THE HISPANO-ARAB AGE OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

760–1450

Intellectual Stagnation of Europe during the Period of Moslem Greatness--High Rank of Scholars in Spain--Attainments of the Khalifs--Character of Arab Literature--Progress of Science--The Alexandrian Museum--Its Wonderful Discoveries--Its Contributions to Learning--Its Influence on the Career of the Mohammedans--The Arabic Language--Poetry of the Arabs--Its General Characteristics--Theology and Jurisprudence--History--Geography--Philosophy--Libraries-- Rationalism--Averroes--Mathematics--Astronomy--Al-Hazen--Gerbert --Botany--Alchemy--Chemistry--Pharmacy--Albertus Magnus, Robert Grossetete, and Roger Bacon--Medicine and Surgery--Ignorance of their Theories and Scientific Application in Mediæval Europe-- Prevalence of Imposture--Fatality of Epidemics--Great Advance of the Arabs in Medical Knowledge--Hospitals--Treatment of Various Diseases--The Famous Moslem Practitioners--Contrast between the Christian and the Mohammedan Systems--Enduring Effects of Arab Science--Its Example and Benefits the Creative Influence of Modern Civilization.

While the Christian world was enveloped in darkness, and all learning save that of worthless metaphysics and polemic theology had been banished from the minds of men; while England was distracted by Danish and Norman invasion, and barbarous monks defied the authority of her kings in the very presence of the throne; while Charlemagne was desolating the provinces of Germany by sweeping and merciless proscription; while ecumenical councils were proclaiming the virtues of celibacy and the sanctity of images; while the populace of Rome was amused by the scandal of a female pope; during this period of intellectual stagnation the Moorish princes of Spain and Sicily, alone among the sovereigns of the West, kept alive the sacred fires of art, science, and philosophy. The thirst of empire, stimulated by the fervor of religious enthusiasm, had subjected to the Moslem sceptre a territory exceeding in extent and opulence the vast and fertile area which, in its most prosperous age, acknowledged the authority of the Cæsars. The Arab capitals of Cordova, Cairo, Damascus, and Bagdad did not yield in magnificence of architecture, in pomp of ceremonial, in the skilful adaptation of the mechanical arts, in the accumulation of prodigious wealth, in the opportunities for luxurious indulgence, to the traditional precedence of imperial Rome. In scientific attainments no comparison existed between the vague and unprofitable speculations derived from the schools of Greek and Latin philosophy and the results obtained from the practical application of principles conducive to the development of the human reason and the promotion of the welfare of mankind. In the intellectual as well as in the physical world the success of the Arabs was unprecedented. During the most splendid period of the Spanish-Mohammedan empire, ignorance was accounted so disgraceful that men who had not enjoyed opportunities of education in early life concealed the fact as far as possible, just as they would have hidden the commission of a crime. On the other hand, the learned--trusted by the sovereign, the oracles of the schools, the depositaries of influence and power--never relaxed their efforts for the development of their talents and the increase of their knowledge; and such was their ardor and their perseverance, that they gave rise to the popular proverb, “There are two creatures that are insatiable,--the man of money and the man of science.” The thorough instruction imparted by the Hispano-Arab institutions of learning was highly appreciated by foreign nations, and students went from the most bigoted communities of Europe to enter the Universities of Cordova and Seville. In every branch of polite literature the indefatigable Moslem manifested his genius and his diligence. His versatile talents and his prolixity are at once the wonder and the despair of the most patient and studious reader. One remarkable personage, Ibn-al-Khatib, of Cordova, who died in the tenth century, is credited with nearly eleven hundred works on metaphysics, history, and medicine. Ibn-Hasen composed four hundred and fifty books on philosophy and jurisprudence. Another writer left behind him eighty thousand pages of closely written manuscript. It was no unusual circumstance for a dictionary or an encyclopædia to number fifty volumes. Commentaries on theology, religious tradition, and law were almost infinite in the extent and diversity of their topics. The historical productions of the Spanish Arabs were probably the most minute and voluminous ever published by any people, and their scrupulous fidelity to truth has been repeatedly established by the comparison of their descriptions with the architectural monuments which have descended to us, and by the corroborative evidence of distant and often hostile writers. The authors are usually deficient, however, in the application, and often even in the knowledge, of the canons of historical criticism; their love of the marvellous occasionally interferes with their judgment, and their descriptions, overloaded with florid rhetoric, belong rather to the province of the orator than to that of the accurate and discriminating historian. More than a thousand chroniclers have illustrated the annals of Moorish Spain. Their style, at once turgid and obscure, often renders their meaning unintelligible, while their text is overburdened with puerile anecdotes, Koranic allusions, and perplexing Oriental metaphors. Generations passed in another land, under conditions of extraordinary political and industrial activity, seemed powerless to eradicate or even to substantially modify the mental characteristics of a race bred amidst the solitude and dominated by the prejudices and the superstitions of the Asiatic Desert. The stubborn persistence of these traits is one of the most singular phases of its life and history. Its polity and its religious belief were foreign to, and irreconcilable with, those that prevailed elsewhere in Europe. Its customs, its language, its literature were all exotic. In works of imagination, the elegant fictions of the East, fascinating to the highest degree, and better adapted to the expanding intellect of man than the coarse and barbaric tales of Gothic origin, soon supplanted the latter, as the light and keen-edged scimetar had already driven out the clumsy broadsword of the followers of Roderick. The practical methods of thought founded upon the system of Aristotle everywhere obtained precedence over the unsubstantial and visionary theories of the Platonic school. In public assemblies, where men and women alike competed for the prize of literary superiority; in social intercourse, where the fair sex were accorded far more liberty than had ever been vouchsafed to the matrons and virgins of antiquity, or than is now enjoyed in the harems of the Orient, were developed and practised those amenities and graces which, fostered by songs of love and gallantry, eventually, through the agency of bard and minstrel, were distributed far and wide throughout the continent of Europe. The desire for learning and the appreciation of its advantages were so universal as to be considered national characteristics. The Khalif was the discriminating and generous patron of genius. His favorite ministers were those whose productions had raised them to deserved eminence in the world of letters. In the Moslem system, a competent acquaintance with the principles of jurisprudence was an essential requisite of every finished education. The wonderful grasp of the Arab mind, which seemed to adapt itself with equal facility to the most opposite conditions, was especially fitted for the exacting requirements of diplomacy,--a calling for which proficiency in learning has, in later times, come to be regarded rather as a disqualification than an advantage. The greatest scholars, therefore, discharged the most important employments, and stood highest in the precarious favor of the Moslem princes of Europe. Their literary productions were recompensed with even greater munificence than their services to the state. They almost constituted a caste, so marked were their pride and exclusiveness. Untold wealth was lavished upon them. They took precedence of nobles who traced their ancestry to a period lost in the mazes of Arabic tradition. Their daughters, occupants of the imperial harems, not infrequently became the mothers of sovereigns. Their ostentatious magnificence moved the envy of the most opulent subjects of the empire. Their residences were not inferior in extent and splendor to the habitations of royalty. Great retinues of slaves attended their progress through the streets. Soldiers in uniforms of silk and gold guarded their palaces, preceded their march, and protected their persons from the effects of popular violence. The most lovely women to be procured in the slave-markets of Europe and Asia filled their seraglios.

The poet, the astronomer, and the historian, raised to posts of high political responsibility, enjoyed the confidence and the intimate familiarity of the monarch in whose presence the most distinguished soldiers trembled. Such was the grateful tribute paid by imperial power to intellectual pre-eminence. That this extraordinary favor should not be abused could scarcely have been expected from even the strongest understandings when subjected to the temptations of flattery and ambition. The lessons of philosophy were insufficient to correct the ignoble vices inseparably incident to human nature, and which, in all ages, have exercised despotic influence over the mind of man. The insolence and rapacity of these ministers rendered them offensive to the people; their dangerous aspirations eventually excited the fears of the sovereign. No class of men was so universally detested. The ancient chronicles are filled with accounts of their cruelty, their injustice, and their misfortunes. Some were sacrificed to the jealousy of their master, others fell victims to the unreasoning fury of the populace. Few there were who retained, in the midst of greatness, those virtues and that modesty which should always characterize the noble pursuit of letters, success in which had raised these statesmen to places of such consideration and authority. While the Koran, as interpreted by the more rigid Mussulman theologians, discourages scientific inquiry and the study of natural philosophy, the Khalifs of Cordova, in more than one instance, incurred the reproach of heterodoxy through the indulgence of investigations prohibited by law to their subjects, and, thus encouraged, the intelligent society of the capital did not disdain to adopt the noble maxim of the head of a rival sect. which declares that “the ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs,” while the consistent believer kept constantly in remembrance the statement of the Prophet that on the Day of Judgment a rigid account will be required of the literary opportunities improved or abused by the Faithful. Not only did these great princes encourage literature by the bestowal of substantial honors and rewards, but they themselves won in that field laurels more profitable and enduring than any gained in the most successful campaign against the infidel. Abd-al-Rahman I. was an astronomer and a poet of unusual ability. Hischem I. and Al-Hakem I. were among the best informed scholars and critics of their time. The talents and learning which rendered illustrious the life and character of Abd-al-Rahman II., his acquaintance with the sciences of law and natural philosophy, his patronage of letters, caused him to be compared to Al-Mamum, the most renowned of the Khalifs of Bagdad. The erudition and acquirements of Al-Hakem II. were prodigious; the volumes of the immense library of Cordova were enriched by notes and comments in his own hand, and such was his zeal that his eyesight was ultimately sacrified to the assiduity with which he applied himself to every branch of knowledge. The imperial dignity, great as it appeared at its culmination, during his reign was the least important of his titles to eminence. In the golden age of Arabic literature, he stood conspicuous amidst thousands of distinguished writers, jurists, annalists, biographers. A critical history of Andalusia which he composed was famous for its accuracy and for the vast stores of information it contained, and, widely read, it long remained a monument to the remarkable erudition and industry of its author. No scholar of his time was his superior in depth and variety of intellectual attainments. He was the master of many languages and dialects. He wrote with equal fluency and elegance on almost every subject. Nothing pleased him so much as the perusal of a new and valuable work, and the accumulation of books was with him a passion, which supplanted the duty of proselytism and the lust of power. His library was so extensive that it overflowed the great building which had been erected for its reception, and whose treasures, the masterpieces of every nation--Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Egyptian, Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic--were the delight of the learned and the marvel of an illiterate and superstitious age.

Abdallah attained distinction by the plaintive elegies in which he celebrated the misfortunes of his house; Suleyman was dreaded for the cutting verses in which he satirized the treachery and hypocrisy of the city and the court.

The spirit of literary taste and rivalry which had inspired the accomplished society of the khalifate was not lost with the dismemberment of the empire. The capital of each principality became a centre of culture, of learning, of the arts. The rulers of these petty states, whose population still retained, amidst the turbulent scenes of civil discord and foreign encroachment, no small measure of that intelligence and taste which had so eminently distinguished their fathers, vied with each other in their encouragement of science and in their patronage of learned men. In this noble emulation, as well as in their own scholastic acquirements, the Moorish princes maintained the fame of their ancestors and the traditions of the monarchy. Every facility was afforded to the professors of experimental science. Political honors, salaries, pensions, attracted the scholars of distant countries. Religious intolerance had no place in a society whose cardinal principle was absolute liberty of thought, and which had long been accustomed to consider the untrammelled exercise of reason as an inherent and inalienable right. Al-Moktadir, King of Saragossa, was renowned for his erudition; his knowledge of philosophy, geometry, and astronomy was superior to that of any of the wise men of his court. Al-Modhaffer, King of Badajoz, compiled a great encyclopædia. The rulers of Almeria, Valencia, and Seville were not less distinguished for their profound scholarship and the protection they afforded to letters. The monarchs of the Abbadide dynasty, and especially Motamid II., were renowned for the harmony and pathos of their verses. The Almohade sovereign, Abd-al-Mumen, the nominal representative of the destroying principle of fanaticism, was the admiring patron of Ibn-Tofail, Ibn-Zohr, and Averroes, three of the greatest writers who ever embellished by their talents the literature of any age. The achievements of the Alhamares of Granada in the world of art and science, and the culture of their court--the last refuge of learning in mediæval Europe--form the most attractive episode in the annals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Encouraged by the example and the patronage of royalty, the mental development of the masses advanced with gigantic strides. The spirit of progress, the incentives of a lofty ambition, animated all orders and conditions of men. So universal was the thirst for knowledge that even the blind, though hampered by the unkindness of nature, were still able, in that age of intellectual rivalry, to attain a high rank in the scale of literary excellence. The rhyming dictionaries, suggestive memorials of perverted and laborious ingenuity; the impassioned poems, born of a tropical clime and a sensual religion; the unprecedented and rapid progress attained in the exact sciences; the voluminous works on theology and history, and the incredible erudition of their authors, the numerous universities, the grand libraries, the competitive examinations, the public contests for literary precedence and royal favor, attest a degree of enlightenment little to be expected from a people sprung from a barbarian and idolatrous ancestry, and are all the more remarkable when contrasted with the degradation of contemporaneous Europe. Fanaticism and prejudice closed to the inquisitive mind of the Moslem some of the most important stores of classic wisdom. For, while the natural philosophers and historians of Athens were studied with the greatest assiduity, Mohammedan piety rejected with abhorrence the sublime creations of Grecian poetry on account of the gross fictions of its mythology, so repugnant to the exalted ideas of the unity and perfection of God. Nor was the fiery and impassioned nature of the Arab capable of appreciating the dignity of heroic verse or the measured cadence and majestic pomp of the Attic drama. It delighted in stirring lyrics, satirical epigrams, amatory songs, and pathetic elegiac lays. The marked influence exerted by Arabic poetry on the civilization of Europe has already been referred to in these pages. Its matter is frequently overloaded with quaint conceits and obscure allusions, its lucidity habitually sacrificed to difficult feats of rhyme, its style disfigured by extravagant metaphor and hyperbole. Love of the beautiful, the marvellous, the supernatural were the most prominent characteristics of Arabic writers, and from the effects of these national propensities even dignified works on scientific subjects were not entirely free.

Learned and voluminous as were the purely literary productions of the Hispano-Arab scholars, they were of secondary importance when compared with the practical achievements of the experimenters in the world of science. The Saracens introduced into Western Europe the Indian numerals, the tabulated observations of Babylon, and the discoveries of the astronomers of the Alexandrian School. These wise investigators examined the effect of gravity, and narrowly missed ascertaining its principles; they constructed the pendulum clock and the balance; they explained with perspicuity and exactness the origin of many hitherto mysterious physical occurrences which popular ignorance was accustomed to ascribe to supernatural intervention rather than to the inexorable and necessary operation of Nature’s laws. They were the first to demonstrate that the aerolite was a cosmic fragment and not a missile of Divine wrath, and to subject the substances of which it was composed to chemical analysis. They formulated a table of specific gravities, and the densities of bodies as laid down by them is said by Tyndall not to vary essentially from those accepted at the present day. They understood the force of capillary attraction; they had approximated to the true height of the atmosphere, and had noted its diminished weight at a distance from the earth. As early as the tenth century they had formed singularly correct ideas of the nature and causes of many geological phenomena,--such as the varying erosion of strata by the action of the elements, the presence of fossil remains on the summits of mountain ranges and the different characteristics they exhibited according as their origin was terrestrial or aquatic, the elevation and depression of the surface of the globe extending through inconceivably protracted periods of time. Both chemistry and pharmacy were pursued with remarkable success in the laboratories of Moorish Spain. Medicine and surgery especially engaged the attention of the ambitious student, who found an enthusiastic and dangerous competitor for distinction in the Hebrew, whose attainments and skill not unfrequently placed him at the head of his profession. Dissection was not unknown, but reverence for the dead preserved the human form from the scalpel, and the anatomical researches of the Arab surgeon were, in public at least, limited to animals of the lower orders, multitudes of which were annually sacrificed to the demands of science. In that noble pursuit which has for its object the determination of the motions of the celestial bodies, and the establishment of their relations with each other and with the universe, the Hispano-Arab, as in the investigation of other natural phenomena and in the solution of abstruse philosophical problems, evinced a rare and peculiar aptitude. In Moorish Spain, as in Chaldea, Babylonia, and ancient Egypt--where all astronomers were priests--the sanctuary of God was in part devoted to the study of the most sublime and wonderful of His creations, the visible heavens. Gnomous, astrolabes, dioptras, solstitial and equinoctial armils, were placed upon the minarets of the most sacred temples. The calculations of the observer were completed in the academical institution which Moslem tradition and practice caused to be attached to every building consecrated to the worship of Allah. No profession ranked higher than that of the astronomer. The sovereign loaded him with wealth and honors. In the mosque he was received with a consideration not inferior to that exacted by the most revered expounders of the Mohammedan law. The populace, recognizing in him a mysterious personage who in secret held communion with other worlds, and too often confounding him with the astrologer, gave way as he traversed the streets, and in whispers spoke of him as the heir of the wisdom of Solomon and as a mortal invested with supernatural powers. The study of the heavens was greatly promoted by the progress made in the science of optics, and by the lucid explanation of illusions due to atmospheric refraction. In this way the twinkling of the stars, the apparent inequality of the horizontal and vertical diameters of the planets, and the prolongation of the day after sunset were accounted for. The invention of the telescope, the comparison of observations taken at widely distant stations in every portion of the globe, the perfection of apparatus which measures, weighs, and separates the component elements of our atmosphere, the intelligent application of the principles of physics, and the progressive experience of nine hundred years have not affected the definiteness and scientific accuracy of these conclusions.

The Spanish Moslems possessed both terrestrial and celestial globes; some were composed of brass, others of massy silver. Their astronomical instruments were beautifully made, and were graduated with the greatest minuteness and precision. They had ten different kinds of quadrants, one of the most ingenious and complete having been invented by Al-Zarkal, of Toledo. They made use of clocks moved by water, sand, and weights. The Arabic armillary spheres and astrolabes preserved in the museums of Europe are not surpassed by the most laborious efforts of modern ingenuity in excellence of finish, and in the accuracy of adjustment which implies the possession by the artisan of a competent knowledge of the delicate operations for which they were intended. It must not be forgotten that these instruments, through whose agency such wonderful results were achieved, will compare favorably in elegance of construction with the optical appliances of the best equipped observatory of to-day.

To facilitate the investigations of the natural historian, there were numerous zoological collections, where the habits and characteristics of animals and birds of every description could be observed and noted for the present entertainment and future profit of mankind. The royal botanical gardens contained an endless variety of plants, both indigenous and exotic, cultivated for their brilliant foliage, their grateful fragrance, or their culinary and medicinal virtues.

The portentous development of Arabic intellectual activity presents one of the most interesting and instructive examples of progress in the history of the human mind. The Bedouin was a typical barbarian and freebooter. He had no organized government, and acknowledged no permanent authority. Without a settled habitation, he despised all who pursued the avocations of peace. He subsisted by pillage. His religion was debased, cruel, idolatrous. With the exception of a few poems and some collections of tales recounting the exploits of spirits and magicians, he had nothing which could be dignified by the name of literature. It is true that his language was one of the most copious and flexible ever devised by man, but its powers had never been tested and were practically unknown. Even the courage of the Arab was not exempt from suspicion, and he notoriously preferred the advantages of ambuscade and surprise to the more hazardous encounter of the open field. Almost his sole, certainly his most conspicuous, virtue was hospitality; but every consideration of friendship and courtesy was forgotten as soon as the guest of the night had quitted the precincts of his camp. The prevalence of such conditions was, it must be admitted, eminently unfavorable to the encouragement of science and letters. The Arab conqueror, therefore, in the prosecution of his literary career, owed nothing to the usually powerful influence of national tradition and example. His first important act was the destruction of the great library of Alexandria, his second the spoliation of the monuments of the Pharaohs, and the razing--in order to obtain materials for his own inferior constructions--of the vast structures of Greek and Roman antiquity which adorned that famous capital. The thoroughness with which this work was accomplished is demonstrated by the total absence of any remains of those superb edifices which were alike the pride of the Macedonian dynasty and the boast of the age of Augustus and Hadrian. In these acts of violence he only followed the inherent destructive and predatory instincts of his race. Contact with civilization and experience of its benefits, however, soon wrought a change in his nature, a change momentous in its results and which has no parallel in the annals of human advancement. A century after the Hegira, the descendant of the vagrant Bedouin had attained a remarkable predominance in every department of polite literature and scientific knowledge. The impulse which wrought this mighty intellectual transformation was imparted by Egypt, and sprang from the historical and philosophical reminiscences of the Alexandrian Museum. That renowned institution was the unique and practical embodiment of the passion for innovation, of the inventive faculty, of the utilitarian spirit of the ancient world. The doctrines of the higher antiquity were, as is well known, largely theoretical and speculative. The occasional appearance of men of genius like Hippocrates and Aristotle only served to emphasize the worthless character of the verbose and unprofitable disquisitions of the schools of Greek philosophy. Anterior to the fourth century before Christ, science owed little to experiment, and all knowledge of any value was empirical, or the result of purely accidental discovery. No intelligent method of investigation existed. No system which had for its object the physical amelioration of humanity was deemed worthy of attention. Such practical aims were trifles and beneath the dignity of the wise man of that age. His time was occupied in attempts to explain the nature of the soul, to define the supreme good, to discover the original essence of all created things, to demonstrate the fancied harmony or dissonance of numbers. In these absurd and fruitless occupations were wasted intellectual abilities which, properly directed, might have changed the aspect of nature and the condition of society many centuries before modern inventive genius was afforded an opportunity to exhibit its marvellous powers. The shrewd and discerning soldier, who, in the partition of empire, received as his share the ancient dominion of Egypt, pursued a diametrically opposite course in the policy he adopted for the promotion of education and literature. He united the culture of Macedon and the venerable traditions of the civilization of Persia with the experience gained in many campaigns. His skeptical and arbitrary nature had little sympathy with the abject superstitions of his Egyptian subjects, and still less with the despotic pretensions of their priesthood. His position as ruler invested him with almost theocratical authority. Scarcely was he seated upon the throne before a radical change was resolved upon. The genius of Ptolemy impelled him to attempt the modification of a system, sanctified by the practice of immemorial antiquity, in such a way that its outward observance would not be repugnant to Greek intelligence nor, by the violation of long-established prejudices, the stability of the newly constituted government be endangered. To accomplish this end, the worship of Serapis, the representative of Oriental Pantheism, was introduced. This strange co-ordination of skepticism and idolatry was productive of remarkable consequences. The Egyptians admitted with enthusiasm a new god into their Pantheon. The Ptolemaic dynasty was placed upon a firm and enduring basis. In the magnificent temple where was enshrined the image of the divinity, whose nominal worship became of such importance to future civilization, a grand institution of learning, totally unlike any that had hitherto imparted instruction to man, was established. Considerations of practical utility were recognized as the sole and legitimate objects of its foundation. Observation, experiment, debate, occupied the leisure of its professors. The principles of every known science whose application could enure to the benefit of humanity--medicine, surgery, astronomy, botany, physics--were expounded in its halls. Its library, subsequently destroyed by Amru, was the greatest collection of books ever assembled in ancient times. The fame of this great university soon spread throughout the world. The number of students who attended its lectures was incredible, not infrequently reaching the enormous figure of thirteen thousand. Their ambition was excited by the presence of the sovereign, who often assisted in the experiments and participated in the discussions.

The most prominent characteristic of this unique educational institution was the catholic spirit which it manifested towards the representatives of hostile religious systems. Paganism was the recognized worship of the state. Its temples were numerous, its ceremonials of sacrifice, divination, and augury were performed with every accessory which could be afforded by unlimited wealth and prodigal munificence. Yet the philosophical doctrines consecrated by a hoary antiquity, and whose study has given rise to modern agnosticism, were highly esteemed by the educated classes of Egypt. It was to facilitate their introduction and acceptance that the scoffing Greeks had consented with mock solemnity to prostrate themselves before the altar of Serapis. The Jew, elsewhere despised, readily found a respectful audience for his monotheistic principles in the cosmopolitan society of Alexandria, and, what was to him of far greater moment, an opportunity to reap enormous profits from the commercial advantages offered by the most flourishing metropolis in the world. The fabled genealogies of the Olympian deities were perused by Jewish scholars with the same attention, if not with the same respect, as the sacred legends of the Hebrew race. The poems of Homer survived to delight posterity through the editions of the Alexandrian Museum; the Greek version of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, published by Ptolemy Philadelphus, is still an authority with erudite theologians. The spirit of inquiry was the dominating factor of the Ptolemaic educational and philosophical systems. Every hypothesis was rejected which could not stand the test of practical experiment and demonstration. No fact was considered too insignificant to be made the subject of intelligent and exhaustive scrutiny. The most abstruse problems of mathematical and physical science, the most obscure and difficult questions concerning life--its origin, its progress, its decay--were daily proposed for investigation and solution. The study of biology was one of the favorite pursuits of the Alexandrian School, and it is not impossible that topics which in recent years have so deeply engaged the attention of the learned may have been a subject of its profound and labored disquisitions. Among these was, perhaps, the doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest, which was not unfamiliar to the Greeks, for its adoption is advocated by Plato in his Republic, and its practical application was long a leading principle of the Code of Lacedæmon. The rational procedure employed in the study of medicine and surgery was most favorable to the prosecution of biological and physiological research. These sciences were established upon the solid foundation of anatomical demonstration. Autopsies and vivisections were of daily occurrence. The active participation of the kings in the operations of the clinic was due, no doubt, to a desire to discover the secret of longevity, and to justify by their sanction proceedings which the prejudices of all the races of antiquity branded as desecrations, actions abhorrent to reverence and decency. Many notable discoveries were the result of these enlightened methods. The offices of the internal organs, the ramifications of the venous system, the form and convolutions of the brain, the phenomena of respiration, digestion, and procreation, were described in terms remarkable for correctness and lucidity. It is a singular fact that in the midst of all these anatomical investigations, many of which were made upon the bodies of living animals, the peculiar function of the arteries remained unknown. The Alexandrian academicians supposed that they were intended, in their normal condition, for the circulation of air, and the vast period of thirteen centuries was destined to elapse before the genius of Harvey designated their true place in the human economy. Herophilus explained the relations of the brain and the nervous system. Erasistratus established the distinction between the nerves of sensation and motion. Alexandria abounded in specialists of every kind,--oculists, lithotomists, surgeons who treated the diseases of women. The practice of medicine was indirectly aided by a pursuit of a widely divergent character, the cultivation of alchemy. As, afterwards, under the Arabs, though not with such marked results, this delusion, through the discoveries induced by its study, proved of substantial service to the intelligent physician. The department of the Materia Medica was enriched by the importation of drugs, and by the cultivation, in botanical gardens, of foreign plants of great medicinal value. The school of the Ptolemies was so famous that an attendance upon its lectures, for however short a period, conferred upon a practitioner great professional distinction. All of the celebrated medical men of antiquity, with the single exception of Hippocrates, derived their information, and were indebted for their success, to the Alexandrian Museum. The extraordinary impulse imparted to all branches of science by this splendid institution was not materially checked for centuries. Before its foundation astronomy had long been stationary, but with the facilities it afforded a gigantic advance was accomplished. The heavens were mapped out and the constellations defined. The stars were catalogued. The motions of the planets were observed and compared, and the erroneous but plausible system of eccentrics and epicycles invented to account for the various phases they presented at different times. The globular form of the earth was demonstrated to the satisfaction of every intelligent mind. The mechanism and cycles of eclipses, the precession of the equinoxes, the first and second inequalities of the moon were explained. Estimates, more or less approximated to correctness, were made of the dimensions of the globe. Its surface was delineated, its climates described, hypotheses to account for the phenomena of its atmospheric changes advanced. Besides those already referred to, all sciences of a practical tendency--geometry, botany, natural history--were accorded a place in the course of the Museum; even the ordinarily prohibited studies of astrology and divination were not excluded. The names of such mathematicians as Euclid, Archimedes, and Conon; of such astronomers as Ptolemy and Hipparchus; of such geographers as Eratosthenes; of such geometers as Apollonius Pergæus; of such ornithologists as Callimachus; of such poets as Theocritus and Lycophron, suggest the infinite obligations of posterity to the noble institution established by Ptolemy Philadelphus at the mouth of the Nile. From such a source was derived the inspiration of Arab intellectual progress that preserved and multiplied the precious literary treasures in which were embodied the wisdom and the achievements of antiquity. That inspiration was, however, destined to long remain dormant. A melancholy period of eleven centuries of bigotry, ferocity, and ignorance separates the Alexandrian Museum from the University of Cordova.

To the unrivalled capabilities of the Arabic language was principally due the success of those who employed it in all branches of literature. That rich and sonorous idiom, isolated for centuries in the Desert, had been formed and perfected without contamination by extraneous influences. The peculiarities of its alphabet, the infinite multitude of its terms, the complexity of its conjugations, and the obscurity of style which its writers regard as an excellence worthy of assiduous cultivation, render its mastery by one not native to the soil a task of almost insuperable difficulty. The perfection of its grammar and the elegance of its construction imply many centuries of use and much literary practice for their establishment. Each tribe had contributed to its copious vocabulary. The number of synonyms by which objects of common occurrence or habitual usage are designated is enormous. It contains eighty names for honey, two hundred for a serpent, five hundred for a lion, one thousand for a sword. It has exerted a marked and permanent influence on the idioms and the literature of Europe. Many of our most familiar English terms have come down from it unaltered. French abounds in words and expressions derived from the same source. Spanish has been called a corrupt Arabic dialect, and its richness in proverbs is due to the use of that tongue in the Peninsula for nine hundred years. The influence of the Sicilian Moslems on Italian is very apparent. The Romance languages were largely Arabic and Hebrew. This exuberance gave the poet an immense advantage for the exercise of his talents. The periodical literary assemblies, popular in Arabia, had the effect of improving the diction of the competitors, and contributed greatly to the embellishment of the language in which their poems were composed. Facility of versification was so common that its possession was not regarded as an accomplishment, except where it produced results denoting unusual ability. So many words have a similar termination in Arabic, that in poems of considerable length the same rhyme is alternately made use of from beginning to end. Improvisatorial skill, so highly esteemed by the Moors, was rather mechanical than the result of poetic inspiration, and was immensely facilitated by the abundance of terms at the command of the poet, whose mind was trained to this mental exercise from childhood. Arabic versification readily adapts itself to every quantity and variation of numbers required by the practice of the art of poetical composition. It is lavish in the use of metaphor, simile, antithesis. In elegance of style, in brilliancy of expression, and in fertility of fancy it presents examples not inferior to the finest models of classic antiquity. Its characteristic extravagance was the result of national taste, a taste often perverted by a passion for the weird and the supernatural. It delights in the representation of abstractions as material beings; it bestows life and speech upon the zephyr and the rose. The play of words in which it abounds, the elaborate and quaint conceits dependent upon pronunciation and upon phrases susceptible of varied significance, while they may obscure the diction, are never suffered to interfere with the harmony. The vivacity of Arabic poetry is one of its greatest charms. Its imagery is born of the fiery imagination of the East; its proficiency in the delineation of human passion is the fruit of centuries of study, reflection, and jealous rivalry. Perfect familiarity with the poems of the pre-Islamic Bedouins, regarded as models by every generation of their descendants, was considered an indispensable qualification of every well-informed scholar. The Arabs were so deeply impressed by the potent influence of poetical genius that they assigned it a place among the kabbala of magical science. Rhymes were introduced into the most solemn discussions. An impromptu couplet opportunely spoken was often the surest recommendation to the favor of a prince. Poetic sentiment was such an essential characteristic of the Arab intellect that even grave metaphysical and historical treatises were designated by the most romantic and whimsical titles.

Under the Mohammedan dynasties of Spain the wit and skill of the successful poet claimed and enjoyed the highest consideration. It has been aptly remarked that poetry was the central point about which revolved the intellectual life of the Andalusian Moors. Its influence upon the invaders was rather augmented than diminished by the transplantation of the lyrics and satires of the Desert to the soil of Southern Europe. The universality of its cultivation and the honors and emoluments which rewarded popularity expanded its productions to an enormous volume. At the close of the reign of Al-Hakem II., hundreds of manuscripts were required for the catalogues of the poetical works which crowded the shelves of the imperial libraries. Verse was employed alike in the most momentous and the most unimportant transactions of life, in the congratulation of royalty, in the celebration of triumphs, in the familiar intercourse of neighbors and friends, in the frivolities and gossip of the seraglio. Its power over the nature of the sensitive and impulsive Asiatic cannot be measured. It diminished the agony of the suffering. It hastened the cure of the convalescent. Its voice brought temporary oblivion to the dungeon of the captive, its pictures of paradise lighted the dark pathway to the grave. Rhyming prose was used in private correspondence by all persons who laid claim to good breeding. The Hispano-Arab histories are filled with verses. They were frequently employed to relieve the severity of scientific works, whose authors were equally celebrated as philosophers and as poets. Diplomatists inserted couplets and stanzas of more or less merit and propriety into their state papers. The passport given to the great scholar Ibn-Khaldun by Mohammed V., King of Granada, was written in rhyme.

In the classification of subjects, amatory poems, as in all countries which acknowledge the power of the lyric muse, claim precedence. It is obviously unfair to judge Hispano-Arab poetry by the accepted rules of modern criticism. The totally different conditions of society, the education of an audience whose ideas of literary excellence and correctness of expression were strongly at variance with ours; the similes, now obscure, but then full of meaning to the appreciative listener, the idioms of a copious and extremely complicated language but imperfectly understood by the most accomplished scholars of our day, ignorance of the physical environment of the writer, the distance and vicissitudes of nine centuries, all contribute to render the formation of an accurate and impartial opinion on the merits of Arab poetry an arduous, indeed an almost hopeless, task.

The exalted position occupied by women under the Arab domination in Spain gave them an influence, and invested them with an importance, elsewhere unknown in the Mohammedan world. This peculiar social condition had a tendency to restrain the sensual instincts of the bard, not yet entirely emancipated from the coarse traditions of the Desert, while at the same time it encouraged the cultivation of generous and lofty sentiments. Admiration for the qualities and accomplishments of the mind gradually supplanted the hyperbolical praise of corporeal perfection, which had hitherto predominated in the compositions of the Arabian poet. The verses of the later era of the khalifate allude to the perfections and graces of the sex in terms of honor and veneration worthy of the noblest paladin of chivalry. This admiration was intensified by the eminent rank attained by many women in the literary profession. The female relatives of khalifs and courtiers vied with each other in the patronage and cultivation of letters. Ayesha, the daughter of Prince Ahmed, excelled in rhyme and oratory; her speeches aroused the tumultuous enthusiasm of the grave philosophers of Cordova; her library was one of the finest and most complete in the kingdom. Valada, a princess of the Almohades, whose personal charms were not inferior to her talents, was renowned for her knowledge of poetry and rhetoric; her conversation was remarkable for its depth and brilliancy; and, in the academical contests of the capital which attracted the learned and the eloquent from every quarter of the Peninsula, she never failed, whether in prose or in poetical composition, to distance all competitors. Algasania and Safia, both of Seville, were also distinguished for poetical and oratorical genius; the latter was unsurpassed for the beauty and perfection of her calligraphy; the splendid illuminations of her manuscripts were the despair of the most accomplished artists of the age. The literary attainments of Miriam, the gifted daughter of Al-Faisuli, were famous throughout the Peninsula; the caustic wit and satire of her epigrams were said to have been unrivalled. Umm-al-Saad was famous for her familiarity with Moslem tradition. Labana, of Cordova, was thoroughly versed in the exact sciences; her talents were equal to the solution of the most complex geometrical and algebraic problems, and her vast acquaintance with general literature obtained for her the important employment of private secretary to the Khalif Al-Hakem II. Inherited genius for poetical composition, joined to constant familiarity with its exercise, the tendency of early education, the influence of intellectual association and example, the exalted estimation in which proficiency in it was held, the extraordinary facility afforded by the Arabic language for the formation of rhyme, the inherent predilection of the Asiatic for the employment of epigram, hyperbole, and allegory, called into existence a race of juvenile poets whose number and abilities seem, in our practical and unimaginative age, absolutely incredible. In readiness of improvisation and quickness of repartee these youthful rhymers displayed talents scarcely to be expected of the most precocious intellect. Some of the rhyming couplets composed by the children of Moorish Spain which have descended to us, in propriety of expression and elevation of feeling, in aptness of comparison and in elegance of style, are not inferior to the classic productions of educated maturity.

Nor was the taste for and the delight in the arts of extemporaneous composition confined to the eminent and the learned; all classes practised it, and it was said that in the district of Silves alone there was hardly a laborer to be encountered who could not improvise creditable verses with facility. Volumes devoted to the lives and productions of the princely and noble poets of Andalusia were published; the palaces of royalty and the mansions of the great fairly swarmed with men of genius and poetasters, greedy of wealth and ambitious of renown. The ancient and venerated models of the Desert were never lost sight of in the productions of Moslem Europe. Their striking peculiarities, their lofty sentiments, their obscure metaphors, their extravagant panegyrics, their fantastic imagery, were regarded as merits which, while they might provoke, would ever defy imitation. In Andalusia, however, the enlarged and humanizing ideas of an advanced civilization, the steady march of material and intellectual improvement, familiarity with the literary masterpieces of antiquity and intercourse with foreign nations, modified to some extent the character of the subjects treated by the Moorish poet, although his style remained the same. Similes deduced from the nomadic life of the Bedouin--a life abandoned, centuries before, for the monotonous occupations of trade and agriculture--still, in the midst of conditions incompatible with the existence of predatory habits, and side by side with the tribal hatred whose intensity never diminished, maintained their universal ascendency. Adroitness in the metrical art; the gift of combining the infinite resources of the Arabic idiom in complicated phrases and rhymes which nothing but the enthusiasm and penetration of the illuminated could understand and unravel; the introduction of mysterious allegories, remote and obscure analogies, bold and striking antitheses,--these were the artificial excellences of Hispano-Arab poetry. The perfect comprehension of its productions implies an acquaintance with the language practically unattainable by a foreigner. The original form of Semitic poetry, whether Hebrew or Arabic, was improvisatorial; it was inspired by passing events; it was gay or plaintive, didactic or satirical, but never solemn and grandly impressive, like the sublime flights of the Grecian muse. The Arab poet was deficient in the dramatic faculty. His versatility, elsewhere remarkable, was unequal to the composition of an epic. His ignorance was so profound that he could not even give a correct definition of tragedy or comedy. To the greatest scholars of Mohammedan Spain, men who knew Aristotle by heart, and who were capable of the instant solution of the most difficult equations of Conon and Euclid, the works of Sophocles, Æschylus, and Euripides were unknown. The mental constitution of the Arab was thus not adapted to the creation of plays, a form of literature also discouraged by his traditions; while his prejudices forbade the study of the classic models which his religion stigmatized as idolatrous and indecent. Poetical narration was not unfamiliar to him, but a lengthy historic or allegorical composition, either in blank verse or rhyme, which required sustained and protracted action, was both repugnant to his taste and beyond his powers.

While love-ditties were the favorite productions of the Hispano-Arab, the martial lyrics of battle and triumph, sonnets depicting the pleasures of wine with more than Roman freedom, and the mourful elegies suggested by the events of a decadent empire, claimed a large proportion of the efforts of his poetic genius. Among the myriad poets whose compositions have adorned the Moorish domination in Spain, it is difficult to attempt to distinguish a few of superior merit; yet the following may be designated as masters in that art whose possession was a passport alike to political eminence and popular veneration. Ibn-Hasn, Ibn-Zeidun, of Cordova, Abbas-Ibn-Ahnaf, were noted for the sweetness and beauty of their amorous songs; the martial airs of Ibn-Chafadscha, of Valencia, chanted by the Moslems in the front of battle, assisted in turning the tide of many a doubtful day; the bacchanalian verses of Ibn-Said, of Seville, were the delight of the corrupt and voluptuous Andalusian capital, and were even sung by the children in the streets; the keen satires of Ibn-Ammar of Silves--the unhappy memories of whose early life, passed in mendicity, tinctured his writings with bitterness even when raised by his talents to the highest posts in the kingdom--spared neither prince nor courtier in their indiscriminate and playful wit; Abul-Beka, of Ronda, Ibn-al-Lebburn, of Murviedro, and Ibn-al-Khatib, of Granada, described, in language of inexpressible beauty and pathos, the national calamities inflicted by Christian supremacy,--the dissolution of empire, the desecration of the sanctuary, the dismemberment of families, the exile of the vanquished, the horrors of servitude.

The ordinary lyrics of the Spanish Moslems were technically known as the Kasida and the Ghazal, and, in the composition of both, only the alternate verses were in rhyme. The sonnets of Petrarch are modelled after this peculiar method of versification, or rather after its imitations prevalent among the vagrant poets of Southern Europe. It was principally through the example afforded by the Moorish kingdom of Sicily that an intellectual impulse was imparted to the founders of Italian mediæval literature. The Mohammedan princes who governed that fertile island were generous and enthusiastic patrons of letters. The Normans, whose enlightened spirit preserved with little modification the laws and customs of a civilization whose benefits were so apparent, encouraged with especial favor the labors of the Arab muse. The compositions of the Sicilian poets embodied principles and were governed by canons identical with those in vogue beyond the Pyrenees. In a land abounding in classic associations, the scene of military and maritime events upon whose issue had depended the destiny of empires; whose striking natural features had given rise to the most charming fictions that adorn the productions of antiquity, and where the architectural monuments of Grecian elegance and grandeur recalled the magnificence of former ages; the Arab, enveloped in the exclusiveness of his own personality, fettered by the influence of inherited tradition, never departed from the beaten track of his ancestors. Physical environment, unusually so potent in the formation of taste and the modification of national impulse and individual characteristics, produced no visible effect upon the mental constitution of the Moorish poet. Everything else--physiological peculiarities, the general tendency of thought, the nature of the objects of intellectual inquiry, opinions of the benefits to be obtained from the prosecution of scientific pursuits, the occupations of daily life--underwent radical changes, but the methods of the poet remained to the last invariable. The persistence of this spirit of immobility is further demonstrated by the popular ballads of the conquerors to whom the Moslems bequeathed it. The striking resemblance of the songs of the troubadours to those of the Arabs indicate plainly the source whence the former derived their inspiration. Other circumstances, based upon national customs, go far towards confirming this opinion. The Mohammedan Peninsula abounded with itinerant rhymers and sonneteers. They travelled from mansion to mansion, everywhere welcomed with joy and hospitality. They attended the person of the prince. They formed an indispensable part of the retinue of every great household. Their poems were ordinarily improvisations, evoked by the occurrences of the moment or the suggestions of the locality. Their compensation was gratuitous, entirely dependent upon the caprice of the patron or the generosity of the auditory. The privileged character of their profession enabled them to use a boldness of speech and a freedom of criticism which an ordinary personage would not have dared to exercise. In their train often followed the story-teller, the prototype of the jongleur, whose lineal descendant may still be seen amusing with his coarse buffoonery the idle crowds of Tangier and Cairo.

The graceful courtesy and deference to the sex, which were the indispensable attributes of every gallant cavalier, in short, the very genius of chivalry, originated among the Spanish Mohammedans. The women of Christian Europe--except in countries influenced by Moslem culture--from the tenth to the fifteenth century received no such social consideration and enjoyed no such educational advantages as did their infidel sisters of the Peninsula. In Southern France and Italy a tolerant spirit, fostered by a light and pleasing literature, had invested woman with an eminent, indeed with a despotic, authority. Elsewhere it was far different. Condemned to unspeakable hardships; degraded by brutal associations; if of high rank, the mere plaything of a tyrannical master; if born in an inferior position, classed with beasts of burden; in every situation of life kept in ignorance; subject to insult, to oppression, to all the sufferings incident to a condition of humiliating dependence little removed from servitude, such was the lot of woman in orthodox Christendom. This state of moral and physical degradation long prevailed, save where intimate contact with Arab civilization produced a substantial and permanent improvement of social and intellectual conditions. The most important factor of this metamorphosis was the poetry of which the troubadour was the exponent. This erratic calling drew its members from every rank of society: it included sovereigns, princesses, nobles, peasants, beggars. As the rhyming instinct is not innate and almost universal in Europe as in Asia, the often unlettered troubadour was more highly considered in Languedoc and Calabria than was the wandering poet among the hypercritical literary dilettanti of Seville and Granada.

In addition to the presumption afforded by the resemblance of subject, style, and metre, the fact that only countries contiguous to, or directly influenced by, Moorish civilization during the Middle Ages developed a taste for poetry similar to that of the Arabs, furnishes strong corroborative evidence that the _gai science_, as the art of improvising verses was called, was of Arabic derivation. The natural haunt of the troubadour was the romantic, semi-tropical region washed by the waves of the northwestern Mediterranean. The genius of his poetry--ardent, extravagant, voluptuous--had nothing in common with the cold and sluggish spirit of the North. France and Italy were the only European countries whose boundaries coincided with those of the Moslems. In both the revival of learning, after centuries of darkness, first arose. France was the abode of the Huguenot and the Camisard; the birthplace of Henry IV. and Coligny; the seat of the Great Schism which rent the Church in twain; the vantage-ground of the philosophers who precipitated the frightful struggle for civil and religious freedom in the eighteenth century. Italy was the land of Galileo, of Bruno, of Savonarola, of the Medici; the home of the Florentine academicians, whose labors and experiments effected so much for the advancement of science; the scene of the most extensive reaction against mediæval ignorance,--a movement inaugurated in the immediate neighborhood of Rome, and in defiance of the vehement protest of the Papal See. The greatest names in Italian literature insensibly acknowledged their obligations to Arabic poetry, by adopting the style and rhythm of its European imitators, the troubadours. The peerless Dante himself did not disdain to follow and to advocate the observance of its rules. The Canzoni of Petrarch present innumerable points of resemblance to the productions of Moslem Sicily. Ariosto is greatly indebted to Elmacin. In the melodious and charming songs of Lorenzo, the same sources of inspiration are discernible, and the same rhyme is used. In England, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer bear an unmistakable relation in form and metre to the mediæval compositions of Southern France. Nor was this powerful and all-pervading influence confined to poetry. The tales of Boccaccio have an Oriental cast. The very manner of their recital recalls the customs of the Desert. They are reminiscences of the popular calling of the Provençal jongleur and the Arabic story-teller. In the license of their expressions, in the wit of their repartee, in the amusing character of the events which they describe, they may be classed as realistic adaptations of the Thousand and One Nights. The patronage and example of the Emperor Frederick II. carried beyond the Alps the cultivation of letters, and with it the traditions of Sicilian civilization. From this literary transmigration originated the Minnesingers, German counterparts of the troubadours, whose elegant verses sensibly modified the innate coarseness of the Teutonic character, and introduced a spirit of refinement, in pleasing contrast with the drunken orgies of the banquet and the festival. Their two principal productions, the Minnesong and the Minnelay, were models of elegance of diction, beauty of sentiment, and perfection of rhyme. For more than a century they were the delight of all classes of German society, nor did any compositions of equal merit succeed them until the age of Goethe and Schiller. Into Germany were also introduced, by the influence of the Emperor, a spirit of inquiry, the foundation of all true knowledge, and the philosophical and heterodox ideas entertained by the educated Moslems of his Sicilian dominions. The ultimate effect of this enlightened policy upon the national mind, imperceptible at the time, but increasing in intensity with the lapse of centuries, was the defiant course of Luther, which established the right of private interpretation of the Scriptures and shook the foundations of the papal throne. The fact that these three countries, which alone were directly acted upon by the spirit of Arabic learning and the example of Moorish civilization, were the scene of the revival of letters, when the rest of Christendom was plunged in the most abject ignorance, is of profound significance in ascertaining the causes that, promoting the intellectual advancement of Europe, have culminated in the great scientific achievements of modern times.

In Moorish Spain great attention was paid to the study of the kindred subjects of theology and law. The commentaries on the rites of the various sects into which Islam is divided; the arrangement and review of the enormous mass of tradition which tends to elucidate or to confirm the ambiguous texts of the Koran; the digests of the decisions whose authority is considered unimpeachable, form a stupendous body of literature chiefly remarkable for the patience, the learning, and the labor necessarily employed in its compilation. The muftis and the faquis were the authorities whose office it was to explain perplexing questions of Mohammedan jurisprudence. In the system of the latter, a system generally remarkable for its simplicity and efficiency, the Koran was the guide of every magistrate. The rules were supplemented by the precepts and suggestions of the Sunnah, a collection of traditions derived from sources more or less authoritative, and transmitted through many generations. The conflicting interpretation placed upon ancient customs sanctified by prescription, and the disputed authenticity of many of them, gave rise to a swarm of sects whose rancorous disputes were often terminated by bloodshed. In the Moslem judicature, the sovereign was the sole fountain of justice. Heir to the patriarchal customs of the East, he often sat in judgment at the gate of his palace, heard the complaints of his subjects, composed their quarrels, reproved their faults, condemned their animosity, and decided upon their merits all controversies between worthy litigants. Under him was the kadi, in whom was vested civil and criminal jurisdiction, whose judgments were rendered and whose sentences--from the scourging and the cruel mutilations enjoined by the law to the supreme penalty of decapitation--were executed with a relentless promptitude little in accordance with modern ideas of criminal procedure. In these courts there were no opportunities for oratorical display; custom discouraged such exhibitions; and Arab eloquence, unlike that of other nations, was most concise and laconic. The doctors of the law and the commentators on the Koran received greater homage than any other class of Moslem men of letters. Their occupation invested them with a measure of the reverence enjoyed by the works to which their labors were consecrated; it implied the possession of superior knowledge, perhaps of inspiration; they were ordinarily personages of venerable appearance and irreproachable character; and upon their opinions, promulgated with all the authority of age, wisdom, and experience, depended the administration of justice and the preservation of order throughout the vast extent of the empire.

The extensive and diversified character of the works of the Arabs is one of the wonders of literature. This extraordinary fertility attained a greater development in Spain than in any other portion of the Mussulman empire. Al-Modhaffer, King of Badajoz, wrote fifty volumes; Ibn-Hayyan, sixty; Honein, a hundred; Abdallatif and Ahmed-Ibn-Iban, the same; Ibn-al-Heitsam, two hundred; Abu-Mohammed-Ibn-Han, four hundred; Ibn-Habib-al-Solami and Abu-Merwan-Abd-al-Melik, each a thousand.

In the realm of history and biography the genius of the Hispano-Arab was most prolific. The subjects treated are of great variety, and are usually expanded into a prodigious number of books. Tedious and obscure as is much of their narrative, its minuteness of detail and extraordinary fidelity to truth render the surviving collections--which, extensive as they are, compose but a fragment of the historical literature that once existed--invaluable to the student. The biographical dictionary of Hadji Khalfa contains notices of twenty thousand works, of which twelve hundred are historical. The Arabic critical, theological, and geographical cyclopædias were scarcely less voluminous.

The plan of this work does not contemplate more than a passing allusion to the principal historical writers whose learning and talents were conspicuous during the Moorish domination in Spain. Among them may be mentioned Ibn-al-Afttas, Prince of Badajoz, who composed a valuable treatise on the political and literary events of the Peninsula; Ibn-Ahmed-al-Toleytoli, of Toledo, who wrote a General History of Nations; Al-Khazraji, of Cordova, to whom is attributed a History of the Khalifs; Al-Ghazzal and Al-Hijari, who published, the one a rhyming history, the other a topographical description of Andalusia; Ibn-Bashkuwal, of Cordova, and Mohammed Al-Zuluyide, famous for their biographical dictionaries; Ibn-al-Khatib, of Granada, whose marvellous erudition was displayed in the greatest of his works, The Universal Library, an immense epitome of the literary and historical facts obtainable in his time. Disquisitions on general topics were not, however, the favorite employment of Moorish authors; their subtle minds preferred the narration of important events, the tracing of remote causes, the solution of obscure historical problems. In the treatment of special subjects they displayed a wonderful, often a tedious, prolixity. Each khalif and prince entertained at his court an historian charged with the description of the principal occurrences of his reign. Every town had its annalist, every province its chronicler. There was not an art or a science, not a profession or a calling, whose origin and influence had not been described, and its distinguished teachers enumerated, by some eminent writer. Mohammed Abu-Abdallah, of Granada, compiled an historical dictionary of the sciences; Al-Assaker is credited with a curious and instructive history of inventors. Even animals famous for their superior qualities were assigned an honorable place in the biographical productions of the Spanish Mohammedans. Abu-al-Monder, of Valencia, and Ibn-Zaid-al-Arabi, of Cordova, composed memoirs recounting the genealogy, the endurance, the speed, and the beauty of certain horses conspicuous in a race proverbial for its excellence. Abd-al-Malik wrote an account of celebrated camels. The names given to books, even by the grave and pious, partake of the fanciful and figurative imagery of the Orient, and were suggestive of the most precious objects admired and coveted by man, such as “The Silken Vest,” “Strings of Pearls,” “Links of Gems,” “Prairies of Gold.” From a remote antiquity similar titles had been adopted, for, as has already been remarked, the earliest of Arabic poems, the Moallakat, derive their collective appellation, not from having been suspended in the Kaaba of Mecca, but on account of their figurative resemblance to the pendants of a necklace.

The Arabic language, regarded by Moslems as the most perfect of all idioms, received great attention from grammarians. Their works upon this subject are infinite, exhaustive, perplexing. One treatise, in a hundred parts, treats solely of genders. Knowledge of this character was held in the highest estimation. Abu-Ghalib, of Murcia, refused a thousand dinars of gold from the sultan of that kingdom, who had solicited, as an honor, the dedication of a work upon grammar composed by that celebrated scholar, whose labors were devoted to the instruction of the people, and not to the flattery of power. Natural history, chronology, numismatics, were treated at great length by the European Moslems. The menageries and aviaries maintained in the principal cities afforded unusual advantages to the student of zoology. Chronological computations were based upon the deductions of the Alexandrian Museum. The Moorish scholars of Spain and Sicily made invaluable contributions to the general stock of geographical knowledge. The measurement of a degree which they effected approximates very nearly to the one accepted by modern science. Abulfeda enumerates sixty Arabic geographers who lived before the thirteenth century. Many of their maps were veritable works of art, in which, upon a ground of silk, continents, mountains, lakes, and streams, represented in relief, were embroidered in gold and silver. Their researches were aided by the historical remains of antiquity, by the accounts of merchants and mariners, and by the reports of travellers despatched by their sovereigns to collect information in the remotest corners of the earth. Ibn-Hamid penetrated to the most inaccessible regions of Central Asia. Ibn-Djobair visited and described Sicily and the countries of the Orient. The travels of Ibn-Batutah were prolonged through twenty-four years. Obeyd-al-Bekri, of Onoba, was the author of a geographical dictionary, in which were described an immense number of cities, principalities, and kingdoms. The reputation of all medieval geographers, however distinguished, was obscured by the fame of the great Edrisi. A native of Malaga, of royal blood, and a lineal descendant of Mohammed, he united to pride of birth and the advantages of fortune all the learning and all the accomplishments to be acquired in an enlightened age. His relationship to the Prophet invested him with a dignity and an importance second to none, in the sight of every devout Mussulman. His education at Cordova was the best that the ancient capital of the khalifs, still the intellectual centre of the world, could afford. His mind, improved by travel, was familiar with many countries whose physical features he afterwards depicted with such ability. Invited to Palermo by Roger, King of Sicily, he speedily attained a high rank among the scholars of that brilliant court. The geography he composed, partly from his own information, partly from data furnished by the King, who had long made a study of that science, represented the labor of fifteen years. In vividness of description, in accuracy of detail, in correct estimation of distances, it is one of the most remarkable literary productions of mediæval times. The incomplete work of Ptolemy had for centuries been the recognized, indeed the only, authority. The configuration of the earth’s surface, its climates, the locations of continents and seas, of cities and empires, were facts little known, even to persons of the best education. In Christian lands the Church sedulously discouraged all such studies as inimical to Scriptural revelation. Geographical works had already appeared in Arabic, but they were grossly inaccurate, and largely based on fable, romance, and tradition. The compilation of Edrisi marks an era in the history of science. Not only is its historical information most interesting and valuable, but its descriptions of many parts of the earth are still authoritative. For three centuries geographers copied his maps without alteration. The relative position of the lakes which form the Nile, as delineated in his work, does not differ greatly from that established by Baker and Stanley more than seven hundred years afterwards, and their number is the same. The mechanical genius of the author was not inferior to his erudition. The celestial and terrestrial planisphere of silver which he constructed for his royal patron was nearly six feet in diameter, and weighed four hundred and fifty pounds; upon the one side the zodiac and the constellations, upon the other--divided for convenience into segments--the bodies of land and water, with the respective situations of the various countries, were engraved. As a recompense for his skill, Edrisi received from King Roger the remainder of the precious material, amounting to two-thirds, a hundred thousand pieces of silver, and a ship laden with valuable merchandise. Such was the munificence with which the son of a Norman freebooter, bred to arms and rapine and ignorant of letters, rewarded the genius of a scholar whose race was stigmatized by every Christian power in Europe as barbarian and infidel.

In philosophical studies, the European Arab evinced the same curious and inquiring spirit which characterized his investigations of natural phenomena. The multiplicity of sects into which the religion of Mohammed was divided, and the incessant religious controversies which the disputed texts of the Koran and the conflicting interpretations of doubtful traditions evolved, were not favorable either to proselytism or to the maintenance of orthodoxy. The Moslems had their Nominalists and their Realists, their Mystics and their Epicureans. They understood the esoteric doctrines of the most renowned schools of antiquity. They had read and commented upon Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Empedocles, Plato. They were familiar with the atomic theory of Democritus. They recognized the argumentative ability of the Stoics. With the productions of the Alexandrian School--through whose medium was derived their knowledge of the dogmas of the Portico and the Academy--they were thoroughly conversant. The prolonged and attentive consideration of these vain and unprofitable opinions did not, however, commend itself to the ingenious and practical mind of the Arab. He indulged in no abstract speculations concerning the origin, nature, and destiny of man. He wasted no time in attempts to decide the vexed and frivolous question of the supreme good. He regarded with boundless favor the works of Aristotle, a predilection destined with years to develop into an undiscerning admiration akin to idolatry. To the influence of this sage of the ancients, the educated Moorish population of Spain was peculiarly susceptible. The doctrines of Al-Ghazzali, of Bagdad, who lived in the eleventh century, had also obtained general acceptance. His teachings involved the absolute separation of philosophy from superstition. He believed in a higher sphere than that of human reason, where was exhibited the manifestation of the Divine Essence pervading all space, all matter, a form of the Pantheism of India.

The Peninsula had for centuries experienced the ascendency of different races of men, the successive predominance and decay of many forms of religious belief. The transmission of national peculiarities; the survival of various, often hostile, political and social opinions; the comparison of a series of creeds, each claiming divine origin and inspiration, yet each, in its turn, supplanted by a more powerful adversary, had disposed the minds of men to investigation and reason. It was only among the intellectual, however, that such a disposition prevailed. With no class of fanatics did intolerance exist in greater intensity than among the orthodox masses of Mohammedan Spain. Their antipathy to all who questioned the revelation of the Koran or the authenticity of accepted tradition was irreconcilable. In the unreasoning fury engendered by prejudice, they forgot the marvels of the civilization that surrounded them; the encouragement that their greatest princes had extended to learning; the statement of the Prophet that the first thing created by God was Intelligence. While they loved the material pomp which thinly disguised the forms of despotism, while they cringed before the pride of rank and opulence, they found the quiet and unassuming pre-eminence derived from superior wisdom and a profound acquaintance with letters intolerable. These narrow ideas, so prejudicial to mental development, were diligently fostered by the doctors of the law, who discerned, in the general diffusion of philosophical opinions, a serious menace to their importance and dignity. Natural philosophy was the object of their especial abhorrence. A system which professed to account for the familiar phenomena daily manifested on the earth and in the heavens by the operation of natural causes and inexorable necessity, and which absolutely dispensed with divine revelation, might well awaken the suspicion and alarm of a class whose worldly interests absolutely depended upon the suppression of knowledge and the maintenance of orthodoxy. The populace, as usual, sided with their teachers. As a result the philosopher was an object of aversion, often of horror, to the conscientious Mohammedan. In the eyes of the irrational zealot the pursuit of science was a certain indication of a bargain with the devil. No rank, however exalted, was proof against this odious imputation. The greatest of the Ommeyade and Abbaside khalifs, whose highest title to fame was the encouragement of letters, were stigmatized as wizards and magicians. The union of the powers of Church and State in a single individual, and the number and importance of the institutions for the diffusion of knowledge, alone prevented the extinction of learning by popular violence. The majority of the Hispano-Arab princes were men of unusual intellectual attainments,--historians, poets, chemists, philosophers. The patronage they afforded to science had a deterrent effect on those who longed for the restoration of purity of doctrine, which had disappeared, as it invariably does, before the progressive march of civilization. Emulating the examples of the khalifs, the governors of provinces vied with their royal masters in the propagation of knowledge. They founded schools and academies. They offered prizes for new and useful discoveries. At their invitation, the greatest scholars in their jurisdiction assembled once a year at the seat of government, for public discussion of subjects of interest to the learned professions, or of such as could, through the medium of practical inventions, be made to enure to the benefit of the community.

The high estimation in which letters were held was indicated by the honors paid to writers and the consideration attaching to the office of public librarian. In the catalogues were inscribed not only the title of the work, but the name, the parentage, the dates of the birth and of the decease of the author; and, not infrequently, interesting biographical notices were appended to the already ample record. In the provinces, the custody of the assembled manuscripts was entrusted to a noble of distinction; but at the capital the charge of the magnificent library of Al-Hakem was considered an employment worthy of royalty itself, and was committed to Abd-al-Aziz, a brother of the Khalif. The general supervision of all educational institutions was exercised by Al-Mondhir, another brother of Al-Hakem, who, in the absence of the sovereign, presided over the contests of the famous literary institute in which were exhibited the talents and the learning of the aspiring scholars of the empire.

The indefatigable energy of the Arabs exhausted every source of knowledge. Not only did they translate the masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature, but they familiarized themselves with Persian, Chaldaic, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindu, and Sanscrit works. Honein translated the Septuagint into Arabic. Abulfeda was the first to direct attention to the so-called inconsistencies of the Pentateuch and the pronounced materialistic character pervading it; to its want of coherence; to its apparent solecisms; to state that it contains no mention of a future life, of heaven or hell, of the immortality of the soul; and to suggest that its legends indicate a Persian rather than a Jewish derivation. Averroes had mastered and embraced the philosophical ideas of India; he believed in the Universal Intellect; the popular religious fictions which evoke the hopes and fears of the vulgar he treated with contempt. The precocity and vast intellectual powers of the great scholars of Islam are almost beyond belief. Avicenna, at sixteen, had attained to such eminence that learned and experienced physicians came from remote countries to enjoy the benefit of his wisdom; at twenty-two he was Grand Vizier. Abul-Hamid-al-Isfaraini was accustomed to lecture every day on a new topic to a class of seven hundred students of jurisprudence. Yezid-Ibn-Harun, of Bagdad, knew by heart thirty thousand traditions. All were pantheists or agnostics. The generally irreverent spirit of the age is disclosed by the epigram of Abu-Ala-Temouki, “The world is divided into two classes of people,--one with wit and no religion, the other with religion and little wit.”

The instruction imparted by the provincial academies of the empire and by the University of Cordova--the centre of the intellectual activity of Europe--was essentially infidel in character and tendency. The influence of these institutions upon the public mind was immense and far-reaching. Thousands of students attended their lectures. Their professors were the first scholars of the age, whose genius and abilities were not limited to the duties of their calling, but who at times administered with equal dexterity and success the most important judicial and diplomatic employments. Education was in a measure compulsory, and, to obtain additional force for the mandates of the law, the sanction of religion was enlisted, and the school became an indispensable appendage to the mosque. The various institutions appertaining to the academic system of the Peninsula which culminated in the University were graded much as are those of modern times. In Cordova were eight hundred public schools frequented alike by Moslems, Christians, and Jews, where instruction was imparted by lectures. The natural quickness which distinguished the intellectual faculties of the Arab, and his phenomenally retentive memory, enabled him to achieve results of incalculable value to the development of his civilization. This marvellous progress was promoted by every incentive which could arouse the energies of the aspiring or the covetous,--by the expected favor of the monarch, by the prospect of exalted and honorable dignities, by the certainty of magnificent rewards, by the hope of social distinction, by the ambition of literary fame. There was not a village within the limits of the empire where the blessings of education could not be enjoyed by the children of the most indigent peasant, and the universities of Granada, Seville, and Cordova were held in the highest estimation by the scholars of Asia, Africa, and Europe. In the various departments of these great institutions were taught, in addition to the doctrines of the Koran and the principles of Mohammedan law, the classics, the exact sciences, medicine, music, poetry, and art. In the superintendence of academies and colleges, the profession of Islamism was not considered an indispensable prerequisite by a liberal and enlightened public sentiment; scholarly acquirements and devotion to learning were the accepted criterions of fitness for the direction of youth; and both Jews and Christians attained to acknowledged distinction as professors in the great University of the capital. In the ninth century, in the department of theology alone, four thousand students were enrolled, and the total number in attendance at the University reached almost eleven thousand. Nor were these priceless educational privileges restricted to one people or to the votaries of a single faith. The doors of the college were open to students of every nationality, and the Andalusian Moor received the rudiments of knowledge at the same time and under the same conditions as the literary pilgrims from Asia Minor and Egypt, from Germany, France, and Britain. A remarkable correspondence exists between the procedure established by those institutions and the methods of the present day. They had their collegiate courses, their prizes for proficiency in scholarship, their oratorical and poetical contests, their commencements, their degrees. In the department of medicine, a severe and prolonged examination, conducted by the most eminent physicians of the capital, was exacted of all candidates desirous of practising their profession, and such as were unable to stand the test were formally pronounced incompetent. Great and invaluable contributions to the fund of historical and scientific information were made by the members of the various academies and schools. They composed voluminous treatises on surgery and medicine. They bestowed upon the stars the Arabic names which still cover the map of the heavens. Above the lofty station of the muezzin, as he called the devout to prayer, were projected against the sky the implements of science to whose uses religion did not refuse the shelter of her temples,--the gnomon, the astrolabe, the pendulum clock, and the armillary sphere.

The trading expeditions of the adventurous Arab had long before familiarized him with the relative positions, areas, and natural productions of the principal countries of the globe. But the princes of the Western Khalifate, not satisfied with the results accidentally obtained, frequently despatched to the most distant regions accomplished scholars with the object of making new contributions to art, literature, and geography. In consequence of these extensive voyages, no science was better understood by the Moorish teachers than that treating of the earth’s surface; and its practical application was demonstrated by means of accurate representations of its principal features carved in relief upon globes of copper and silver.

In the cultivation of the two sciences, geography was considered as dependent on history, and was often treated in connection with it and in a subordinate capacity. The Chaldean shepherds had already, upon the plains of Asia Minor, by the measurement of a degree of a great circle, determined the form and dimensions of the earth; their observations had been confirmed by the experiments of the Khalif Al-Mamun; and these important data were carried into Spain with many other treasures of Oriental wisdom. The earth was whimsically divided into seven zones or climates, to correspond with the seven planets and the seven metals known to the Arabs, that number having with them, as with other branches of the Semitic race, a peculiar and mystic significance. With the Arab, however, the study of the earth was rather topographical than geometric; his measurements were confined to the estimated distances between important points; and his figures were approximately calculated according to the popular but unreliable conception of the length of a day’s journey, which was usually twenty-five miles on land and a hundred miles by sea. The geographer, in his description of the provinces of a country, devoted much space to the location of springs, wells, and rivulets, a consideration of more importance in the mind of the traveller whose antecedents were to be traced to the pathless and arid wastes of Arabia than were even the woody shores and unruffled harbors of an hospitable coast to the eye of the shipwrecked mariner.

Nor must the libraries be omitted from this list of those factors of progress which so signally contributed to public enlightenment and to the formation of national character. There was no city of importance without at least one of these treasure-houses of literature. Their shelves were open to every applicant. Catalogues facilitated the examination of the collections and the classification of the various subjects. Many of the volumes were enriched with illuminations of wonderful beauty; the more precious were bound in embossed leather and fragrant woods; some were inlaid with gold and silver. Here were to be found all the learning of the past and all the discoveries of the present age,--the philosophy of Athens, the astronomy of Babylon, the science of Alexandria, the results of prolonged observation and experiment on the towers and in the laboratories of Cordova and Seville. Here also were mysterious treatises of Indian lore, whose origin ascended beyond the records of history, whose doctrines, perused for centuries in a dead language, had travelled through the medium of Greek and Arabic versions from the Indus to the Guadalquivir, and were ultimately destined to form the basis of the pantheistic ideas popular among educated persons at the present day. These opinions had, long anterior to the invasion of Tarik, provoked the curiosity and engaged the attention of studious Mohammedans. Under the khalifate, and subsequently, they were taught in the schools of the Peninsula, figured in elaborate disquisitions of philosophers, formed the subject of learned discussion in lyceums and literary assemblies. Their vital principles were founded upon the eternity of matter, the unity of intellect, the final absorption of the spirit of the individual into the Soul of the World. They accounted for the succession of natural phenomena by laws resulting from inevitable necessity. They refused to acknowledge the possibility of the supernatural, and renounced the time-honored and popular idea of incessant providential interventions. They ridiculed the apparitions of angels and demons as phantasms evoked by the credulity and fears of the ignorant. The tenets and ceremonial of religion were regarded as the convenient pretexts and apparatus of imposture. The origin of life was explained by the development of the germ through its latent force. The law of progressive evolution was considered susceptible of universal application, as embracing animal, vegetable, even mineral, forms. The theory of Lord Monboddo, promulgated in the eighteenth century and elaborated with such ingenuity by Darwin in our own time, was, it is evident, far from being original with either; for Moorish philosophers had, ages before, elucidated its leading principles. Thus, in the end, they even went to the extent of including in its operations every description of matter,--a course of thought evidently suggested by advanced Hindu conceptions and confirmed by the fancied analogy between the transmutation of metals and the transmigration of souls, doctrines also imported from the extreme Orient. These ideas, so antagonistic to the dogmas of religion, while long entertained in secret, had been first publicly advocated by Solomon-ben-Gabirol, the Jewish philosopher of Malaga, during the eleventh century. The Moorish school of rationalism soon included many distinguished names. The development of the mental faculties of humanity was declared to be a manifestation of the incessant activity of the omnipotent, intellectual principle that pervaded all Nature. The supreme object of human existence was the mastery of the sensations by the purer and nobler parts of the soul.

From these speculations, generally accepted, the opinions of many of the Hispano-Arab philosophers in time exhibited wide and radical divergence. Some, it is true, adhered to Peripatetic Pantheism in its integrity. Others oscillated between the extremes of mysticism and materialism. Against all, without exception, the doctors and the populace displayed a mortal hatred, whose influence even royal favor was not always able to withstand. Those who had risen to political eminence were compelled to relinquish their employments. Many were driven into exile. The intensity of popular odium forced those who still pursued their studies into obscurity, sometimes into penury. Consciousness of a defective title to the crown often impelled a prince to resort to the ignoble expedient of persecuting science for the sake of obtaining popularity. It was thus that Al-Mansur, the greatest of Moorish conquerors, himself an enthusiast for and an adept in the very studies he professed to condemn, as a political measure for the consolidation of his power discouraged literature and oppressed philosophy.

In spite of the extraordinary literary privileges within their grasp, the masses of Moorish Spain--largely dominated by African influence--never advanced beyond the primary stage of learning. It is true that they appreciated, in a measure, the benefits accruing from the employment of scientific methods in their various occupations of a mechanical or agricultural character. But this reluctant acknowledgment of the advantages of science extended no further. The invincible prejudices of the Semitic race clung to them through all the phases of their civilization. They never discarded the opinions born of a pastoral life, of all the most conducive to the perpetuation of ignorance. Their antipathy to innovation was only exceeded by the aversion they entertained towards all who questioned the authenticity of their religious belief. Greek philosophy they regarded with undisguised detestation. For their countrymen who devoted themselves to its study they evinced an abhorrence greater even than that with which they regarded apostasy.

The most famous of the natural philosophers of Mohammedan Spain, whose transcendent ability has caused him to be considered the exemplar of all, was Ibn-Roschid, popularly known as Averroes. His life embraced the greater portion of the twelfth century; his voluminous works on theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and medicine denote an important epoch in Arabic literature; and his influence, which preponderated over that of any writer of his age, has survived the overthrow of his government, the dispersion of his people, the abandonment of his language, and the manifold catastrophes of more than seven hundred years. His industry was indefatigable. It is said that during the greater part of his life there were but two nights which he did not pass in study,--the night of his marriage and that of the death of his father. The genius he displayed in other professions has been overshadowed by the reputation he acquired as a philosopher. He occupied the responsible position of first physician to the Almohade Emir, Yakub-Al-Mansur-Billah. He administered for a time the office of Grand Kadi of Cordova. His immense erudition was the wonder of Europe. His commentaries on Aristotle were more highly esteemed by his disciples and admirers than were even the originals, the masterpieces of the great founder of the Peripatetics. His popularity with the Jews was so great that manuscripts of his works are more numerous in Hebrew than any other book except the Pentateuch. By his Mussulman contemporaries he was believed to have concluded a compact with Satan; to Christian theologians his name has ever been a synonym of evil. The audacity of his opinions was indeed calculated to provoke ecclesiastical indignation. He diligently inculcated the Indian dogma of Emanation and Absorption. He treated all revelations as impostures. Religions he pronounced convenient instruments of statecraft, admirable contrivances for the preservation of order and the encouragement of morality. The three then predominant in the world he held in equal contempt,--the Christian he declared was impossible; the Jewish he characterized as a creed adapted only to children; the Mohammedan as a doctrine for swine. He indulged in sarcasms highly derogatory to the sanctity of the Eucharist. His popularity among the clerical profession was not enhanced by the saying attributed to him: “The tyrant is he who governs for himself and not for the people, and the worst of tyrannies is that of the priest.”

The power of public opinion, stimulated by the efforts of orthodox Mussulmans, procured the disgrace of Averroes. He was deprived of his judicial office. The honorable post of court physician was taken from him. He was compelled to seek refuge in Africa; his property was confiscated; and, in age and infirmity, he was exposed to the insults of the fanatical rabble, who spat in his face as he sat helpless at the door of the mosque of Fez. With his death in 1198 disappeared from the Peninsula every outward trace of the doctrines of which he had been both the champion and the representative. Posterity, on account of the variety and excellence of his intellectual gifts, the extent of his erudition, and the boldness with which he asserted his opinions, has seen fit to dissociate him from the other learned men of his epoch, his instructors, his collaborators, his disciples. There were many other philosophers, however, such as Solomon-ben-Gabirol, Ibn-Badja, Ibn-Tofail, Ibn-Zohr, who were his equals in learning and scarcely inferior to him in natural courage and in argumentative ingenuity and eloquence.

The apparent extinction of his theories, obnoxious alike to muftis and populace, was illusory. Introduced with other branches of Moslem science by the Jews, through the convenient channels of France and Italy, they eventually permeated the intellectual life of Europe. The Universities of Paris and Padua, the literary centres of the age, were from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century foci of infidelity. The impiety of propositions openly promulgated by the faculties of those two great institutions would to-day shock any one except the most daring agnostic. The seed thus sown bore abundant fruit. All Italy became tainted with heresy. The Lateran Council, summoned to place the official stamp of ecclesiastical condemnation upon the prohibited doctrines, was unable to check their progress. The Jews carried these ideas everywhere; scholastics adopted them; they were even disseminated by members of the monastic orders. Alexander de Hales, of the Franciscans, was one of their ardent advocates. Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, second in attainments and reputation only to his great contemporary Roger Bacon, believed in the Universal Intellect. It was Savonarola who wrote, “Ille ingenio divinus homo Averroes philosophus.” From the propagation of these theories was derived the idea of the mythical book, entitled De Tribus Impostoribus, an alleged satire aimed at Moses, Christ, and Mohammed, variously attributed to a score of authors; supposed to be filled with blasphemy; whose very title was a powerful weapon in the hands of the clergy, yet whose publication was apocryphal, and whose contents were necessarily purely imaginary.

The general acceptance and perpetuation of the opinions of Averroes, denounced from every pulpit, persecuted by the secular authority and anathematized by councils, is a striking proof of the universal decline of ecclesiastical power. The most popular poetical compositions bore the impress of the prevailing spirit of incredulity and pantheism, which indeed pervaded, to a greater or less extent, every class of literature. It was in vain that those most deeply concerned vehemently protested against the alarming growth of this detested heresy. No rank of the clerical order was exempt from its effects; it was whispered that its insidious influence had even penetrated the sacred precincts of the Vatican. That influence was transmitted unimpaired to posterity, and modern science is largely indebted for its inquisitive and impartial spirit to the doctrines of the great Arabian philosopher of the twelfth century.

In their treatment and application of the exact sciences, and especially in the development of the higher branches of mathematics, the Spanish Mohammedans exhibited pre-eminent ability. The Arabs were the first to ascertain with accuracy the length of the year. They tabulated the movements of the stars. They discovered the third lunar inequality of 45´ six hundred and fifty years before Tycho Brahe. They determined the eccentricity of the sun’s orbit; the movement of its apogee; the progressive diminution of the obliquity of the ecliptic; the amount of the precession of the equinoxes. To them is due the credit of having introduced to the knowledge of Europe many ingenious devices and processes of calculation which diminished labor, and, at the same time, opened new fields of investigation that otherwise might have remained unknown and unexplored. The grand work of Ptolemy, the Syntaxis, had, under the name of the Almagest, been translated before the ninth century, and been revised by Isaac-ben-Honein in 827. In the tenth century, the famous Abul-Wefa, of Bagdad, wrote an astronomical treatise to which he gave the same name, which caused the two to be long confounded by scholars. Both of these compositions, equally wonderful for their learning, were early known to the Spanish Arabs. The numerals of India, which they adopted, at once superseded the cumbersome Roman characters hitherto in use. The decimal system was also introduced by them. They greatly advanced the study of algebra, whose scope and possibilities had previously been imperfectly understood, and applied it to geometry. They substituted sines for chords, invented modern trigonometry, proposed a formula for the solution of cubic equations. They understood the principles of the calculus. Geber, of Seville, published rules for one of the most important demonstrations of spherical trigonometry. Al-Zarkal, of Toledo, was the first to suggest the substitution of the elliptical orbit to correct the errors of the generally accepted Ptolemaic system, thus anticipating Copernicus and Kepler. In his attempts to determine the movement of the sun’s apogee alone, he made four hundred and two observations; and the result he obtained was within a fraction of a second of the amount declared to be correct by modern astronomers. Abul-Hassan-Ali, by a series of observations extending over a distance of nine hundred leagues to establish the elevation of the pole, estimated with precision the dimensions of the Mediterranean. The catalogue made by Ibn-Sina contains a thousand and twenty-two stars. Ibn-Abi-Thalta studied the movements of the heavenly bodies without intermission for thirty years. Averroes, while computing the motion of the planet Mercury, discovered spots upon the sun. The far greater portion of the results of the labors of the Moorish astronomical observers of the Peninsula, having shared the general fate of the monuments of Moslem learning, are lost. No complete copy of the works of any Arab astronomer who lived since the ninth century is known to exist. The extent of this calamity may be inferred from the fact that in the royal library of Cairo there were six thousand works on mathematics, copies of many of which must have been in the hands of the Moslems of Spain, and none of which have survived. They made constant use of the formulas of Ibn-Junis for tangents and secants, of whose existence Europe was ignorant for six hundred years after their publication. As the duty of pilgrimage promoted the study of geography, so an acquaintance with astronomy was rendered necessary to Mohammedans by the requirements of their religion. In order to determine the direction of Mecca, an exact knowledge of the points of the compass was indispensable. It was equally important to establish, without error, the hours of prayer and of diurnal ablution, and the dates of festivals which began with the rising of the moon. These considerations, which invested astronomical pursuits with a semi-religious character, greatly promoted their popularity. The study of mathematics was, independently of this influence, an occupation especially congenial to the Arab mind. In all the schools were globes, both terrestrial and celestial, of wood and metal, planispheres, and astrolabes. The construction of these latter instruments, the precursors of the sextant, as perfected by the Arabs, was very complicated, and demanded the exercise of the highest degree of scientific ingenuity. They were used for the measurement of angles, and for ascertaining the hour either of the day or night. Some had as many as five tables, were engraved on both sides, and were provided at the bottom with eleven different projections for as many horizons. On them were represented the movement of the celestial sphere, the signs of the zodiac, and the position of the principal stars and constellations. Interchangeable plates, calculated for different latitudes, facilitated observations wherever made. It was not unusual for an astrolabe to give the latitudes of nearly a hundred cities. The invention of the pierced gnomon by Ibn-Junis greatly simplified observations made to determine the altitude of the sun. The passage of time was usually marked by sundials, and by clepsydras of complex and elaborate mechanism. The oscillatory property of suspended bodies, represented by the isochronism of the pendulum, was familiar to the Arabs, who had adapted it to a contrivance whose construction resembled that of the modern clock, an invention generally attributed to Galileo. Many of the instruments used by them in their astronomical observations were of enormous dimensions. Some of their armillary spheres were twenty-five feet in diameter, and quadrants with a radius of fifteen feet were not uncommon. The bronze sextant, employed in the tenth century for the determination of the obliquity of the ecliptic and described by Abul-Hassan, of Morocco, had a radius of fifty-eight feet, and its arc was divided into seconds. At that time astronomy, especially among the Spanish Moslems, had advanced as far as was possible without the use of the telescope. It was through the influence of the Arabs that knowledge of that science, as well as of all other branches of mathematics, was universally diffused. The modern almanac, as its name denotes, is their invention, and the signs by which it designates the seven planets have been transmitted through their agency. As with all pastoral nations, their attention was early directed to the phenomena of the heavens. They noted the rising and setting of certain stars which seemed intended to mark the advent of the seasons; they divided the most prominent groups into constellations, and assigned to them, as did the Greeks, a fanciful and legendary origin and nomenclature. With the practice of astral worship, incident to every race at a certain stage of its intellectual progress, was associated the study of astrology, whose principles, based upon the imaginary effect of benign or malignant planetary influence, has still in educated as well as in ignorant communities its enthusiastic votaries. The practice of this false but attractive science was, however, in no age confined to impostors. Some of the greatest minds of mediæval or modern times believed in its delusions, which were especially popular with the most eminent astronomers of the Middle Ages. Tycho Brahe, who gravely interpreted dreams, drew the horoscope of the Emperor Rudolph. Even the ability of Kepler did not preserve him from the prevalent superstition; he also cast horoscopes and published prophetic almanacs. Its pursuit led to the cultivation of other and more debased superstitions,--the chimerical follies of geomancy and oneiromancy, the profane rites of divination and magic, the belief in the occult virtues of talismans and amulets. The persistence of those practices, through unnumbered centuries to the present time, is a singular commentary on human credulity in enlightened as well as in unlettered ages. In many parts of Germany the horoscope of an infant is cast at its nativity, and is religiously preserved, with its baptismal certificate, until the hour of dissolution. Our farmers sow and reap and perform the various duties incident to rural economy with diligent attention to the phases of the moon. Confidence in the efficacy of talismans is even in our generation far from extinct. It is unconsciously manifested in the cruciform plan of our majestic cathedrals; in the gilded emblem which points heavenward on the summits of their loftiest towers; in the curves of their painted windows, glowing with all the hues of the rainbow; in the armorial bearings of some of the proudest royal houses of Europe; in the carvings of our furniture; in the horseshoe suspended over doorways; in the Teraphim and the phylacteries of the Jew; in the holy symbols embroidered upon the vestments of the Catholic clergy; in the badges of our secret societies; in the settings of the jewels which rise and fall on the voluptuous bosom of Beauty. The superstition of the evil-eye, universally prevalent in the Orient, is largely responsible for the employment of charms. It is not improbable that this belief may have been originally derived from the peculiar influence exercised by some person endowed with an extraordinary degree of hypnotic power. To animal magnetism--as a mysterious force--is certainly due a large proportion of the magic fascinations of ancient times; and the power of the serpent over birds and animals probably gave rise to the popular fable of the basilisk. The virtues of amulets were derived, according to common opinion, not from the substance of which they were composed, but from the portion of the Universal Intelligence by which they were supposed to be tenanted.

Thus a desire to penetrate the secrets of futurity and avert impending misfortune gave rise to the spurious science of astrology, itself the parent of astronomy. The European Arabs cultivated both with almost equal assiduity. The mind of the philosopher, disciplined by the daily habit of mathematical calculation, was yet unable to discard the delusions of the horoscope or to forget the visionary and fictitious properties of talismans. In the mental constitution of the ablest Arabian scholars, the fascination of the occult and the forbidden predominated over the experience of centuries, the influence of letters, and the dictates of reason.

The discoveries of Al-Hazen in optics, communicated to Europe by the Spanish and Sicilian Mohammedans, have had a marked effect on the development of that science, and are the basis of all that we know on the subject. He understood the cause of the twilight; estimated the density and calculated the height of the atmosphere. He explained by the principle of refraction why celestial bodies are visible when they are actually below the horizon. He discussed the effect upon vision of the varying transparency of the air, and suggested that beyond our atmosphere there was nothing but ether, a proposition which modern astronomy accepts. First of all investigators, he corrected the prevalent fallacy that the rays of light proceed from the eye to the object seen, an error which had hitherto deceived all who had written on the science of optics. The works of Al-Hazen were used as text-books in the Andalusian colleges, and they were first made known to Christendom through the foreigners who came to study Arabic learning in the schools of Toledo. Among such literary pilgrims of the twelfth century were the Englishmen Adelard of Bath, Robert of Reading, Daniel Morley, William Shelley, and the Italian Gerard of Cremona. The translations of Arabic works into Latin introduced by the labors of these and subsequent scholars in the department of medicine alone amount to nearly four hundred.

Great as was the reputation of these ambitious ecclesiastics among the ignorant masses of their countrymen, it did not approach that of the famous Gerbert, whose genius had unsuccessfully attempted the enlightenment of Europe nearly two hundred years before. The attainments of that accomplished scholar, respectable in any age, were so superior to those of his contemporaries that, as has been previously stated, they procured for him the unenviable and dangerous title of magician. A native of Aquitaine, of obscure birth and without resources, his talents early attracted the notice of the Count of Barcelona, who provided for his education in that city. Thence, after a time, he visited the principal Moorish cities of Andalusia. It was the tenth century, the epoch of the highest prosperity and magnificence of the Ommeyade Khalifate. Everywhere were visible the effects of that civilization which had no rival in the world. The thorough agricultural development of the country; the busy seaports; the luxurious palaces; the populous cities; the well-paved streets, filled by day with surging multitudes, and lighted at night by tens of thousands of twinkling lamps; the illimitable expanse of verdure which marked the environs of the great Moorish capital, broken only by occasional watch-towers and gilded minarets; the gorgeous splendor of the court; the prodigious libraries; the innumerable schools and colleges, equipped with every scientific appliance known to Moslem culture--colored maps, armils, sundials, clepsydras, hydrometers, parallactic rules, quadrants, astrolabes, planispheres, globes; the mosque with its throngs of pilgrims gay with the costumes of every land acknowledging the creed of Islam,--these scenes did not fail to profoundly impress the young French ecclesiastic, already imbued with prohibited ideas and fresh from the intolerance, the barbarism, the credulity, and the intellectual debasement of Christian Europe. The mind of Gerbert was prompt to recognize the manifold advantages to be derived from familiarity with Moslem institutions and erudition. He became a student of the University of Cordova. During the few years he remained in that city, his talents and perseverance procured for him a fund of scientific information unexampled for that period. On his return he established schools in both Italy and France. He imported books from every quarter of the world, and especially from Spain. His pupils, reckoned by thousands, diffused throughout Europe the fame of their teacher and the precepts of his works. The instruction he imparted embodied the forbidden learning taught beyond the Pyrenees. He was the first to explain to Europeans the abacus, the Indian numerals, the science of arithmetic. He taught geography and astronomy from globes constructed at Cordova. He observed the motions of the planets and determined the elevation of the pole through diopters. The results of the mechanical ingenuity which amused his leisure moments awakened the horror of his ignorant and pious contemporaries. He invented a steam or hydraulic organ; a clock whose mechanism was largely composed of wheels and pinions; and automatons whose mysterious movements suggested to the vulgar a diabolical agency. He improved the science of music. His system of imparting knowledge, based upon experiment and demonstration, exhibited a radical difference from the prevalent methods of an epoch whose instruction was limited to Scriptural texts and ecclesiastical admonition. The renown of the great scholar excited the envy of the monks, to whom the popular imputation of infernal communion afforded a pretext for persecution. They instigated marauders to plunder his abbey at Bobbio, in Italy. His library was burned, his instruments were destroyed, his students dispersed. This ill-treatment, so far from being, as intended, prejudicial to the fortunes of Gerbert, ultimately promoted them. His reputation was everywhere known, and the awe his wisdom excited was increased by the supernatural means he was believed to employ. He was patronized by the King of France and the Emperor of Germany; he became successively Bishop of Rheims and of Ravenna; and, through the influence of the latter sovereign, he was, in the year 999, raised to the pontifical dignity, under the name of Sylvester II. Even in that exalted position, the relentless spirit of ecclesiastical malice did not permit him to rest. His attempts to reform clerical abuses brought down upon him the vengeance of the corrupt and rapacious ministers of the papal court. The most absurd fables were invented to account for the results of his scientific experiments, otherwise incomprehensible by mediæval ignorance. He was accused of gross immorality, blasphemy, magical incantations, the invocation of demons. It was whispered that goblins of fantastic dress and repulsive aspect attended him at midnight during the celebration of impious orgies and profane sacrifices. The diligent propagation of these scandals prepared the way for the punishment meted out in that age to all daring reformers, and especially to those who presumed to interfere with the prerogatives and emoluments of the clergy. A victim of slow poison, Sylvester II. survived his elevation to the Papacy less than four years. His name was anathematized, his doctrines condemned as heretical, and the perusal of his writings prohibited as contrary to the canons of the Church and prejudicial to the interests of religion. After his decease, a long period of darkness again clouded the Christian world. The dawning spirit of inquiry thus suppressed, men once more turned to the priest for counsel, for assistance, for the explanation of natural phenomena, for the cure of disease. Such was the inauspicious and apparently futile result of the first introduction of Arabian learning into Roman Catholic Europe.

The unrivalled excellence of the agricultural methods employed by the Spanish Mohammedans was, in large measure, due to their profound botanical knowledge. That science, practically unknown in the desert wastes of Arabia, to which nature has begrudged the wealth of her vegetable kingdom, was early pursued with great energy and success by the conquering Moslems. In no other part of their empire, however, was such progress made in its study or such beneficial results obtained from the culture of plants as in Andalusia. Their analysis and classification, and the determination of their properties, were sedulously encouraged by the government. The scientific expeditions of the khalifs collected specimens and seeds from every quarter of the world. Gardens for the propagation of both native plants and exotics were established in the environs of all the great cities, and the results of intelligent observation and experiment were regularly tabulated for the public benefit. In the oases of the Desert, along the banks of the Nile, on the fertile plains of Mesopototamia, on the arid plateaus of Central Asia, in the pestilent delta of the Ganges, the botanists of Cordova added to the stock of ideas and principles to be subsequently developed and advantageously applied in the valley of the far distant Guadalquivir. Nor were their efforts confined to the mere collection and examination of products of the vegetable kingdom. Every novel appliance, every useful invention, which might prove beneficial to horticulture, to irrigation, to the various branches of rural economy, were diligently noted and carefully preserved. As a consequence of these laborious researches, the Andalusian Arabs became more proficient in the kindred sciences of botany and agriculture than any people who have ever existed. In their country were concentrated all the fruits of the learning and experience of centuries then extant in the world. It is said that they added to the herbals of the ancients more than two thousand varieties of plants. They described the circulation of the sap; they understood the offices of the bark and the leaves. Every source of information was thoroughly explored. Already, in the tenth century, the treatise of Dioscorides had been translated into Arabic by a monk of Constantinople, sent by the Emperor at the special request of the Khalif, because the subjects of the latter were ignorant of Greek. The botanical works of the Hispano-Arabs were enriched with drawings from nature, beautifully executed in colors. When Ibn-Beithar, of Malaga, the most famous of Moslem botanists, travelled in the Orient, he was accompanied by a corps of artists, whose skill preserved the form and tints of unfamiliar flora in all their beauty and perfection. His is the greatest name in the annals of this important branch of learning from Dioscorides to Linnæus, an interval of fifteen hundred years.

In the wide range of philosophical and experimental study, however, no subject was so congenial to the taste of the Arab or appealed more strongly to his imagination than the pursuit of the spurious science of alchemy. That science originated in Egypt, the land of isolation, of enchantment, of prodigy. Its investigation, confined to a privileged class, had been protected by the double safeguard of religion and secrecy. For innumerable centuries the Egyptian priesthood, the sole depositaries of knowledge, had, in laboratories hidden in temples or excavated in the rocky sides of mountains, eagerly devoted themselves to the discovery of the universal panacea, of the elixir of life, of the transmutation of inferior metals into gold. The Ptolemaic dynasty, heir to these delusions so acceptable to human egotism and avarice, had contributed to their universal dissemination over Europe and Asia. The Arabs, from the first hour of their intellectual emancipation, prosecuted with alacrity a study especially adapted to their national inclination and genius. The fact that the Koran prohibits such occupations made their association with religion, contrary to the custom in Egypt, impracticable. At Toledo and Cordova, alchemy was not designated, as at Memphis and Thebes, the “Sacred Art,” cultivated in the precincts of temples, communicated only to royalty, screened from the profanation of the vulgar by the delusive mummeries of processions and sacrifices. Its close relations with thaumaturgy and divination, with astrology and magic, were inevitable consequences of the uncertainty of its results, and of the mystery that enveloped its professors. Ancient Hebrew tradition, as disclosed by the apocryphal books of the Bible, asserts that the occult arts and sciences were the gift of evil spirits to the children of men. The Romans punished such practices with death, probably for the reason that they came into competition with the oracles, a fruitful source of revenue and prestige to the state. Thus, in a measure, placed under the ban of religion and law, a subject of suspicion and fear to the masses, the study of alchemy was fraught with danger, even amidst the Pagan associations of antiquity. In the Middle Ages, the endangered interests of priestcraft added to legal prohibition and the prejudice of public opinion the resistless force of their condemnation.

The Spanish Arabs, passionately fond of experiment and novelty, were eminently proficient in the technicalities of the Hermetic Art. They entertained the idea that the same elements, in different proportions, were present in all metals, and that, by certain processes of elimination, any metal,--as, for instance, gold,--could be obtained. Like their masters, the Alexandrian Greeks, they concealed their discoveries in the obscurities of a learned jargon. The principles of their calling were indicated by mysterious symbols, enigmatical phrases, mutilated formulas, capable of interpretation only by themselves. With the advancement of learning, the operations of the alchemist were practised with less concealment and mystery. His labors were encouraged by the khalifs, of whom some were themselves adepts, and prosecuted their investigations in well-equipped laboratories. The prevalence of one delusion led to the propagation of others, and the original objects of alchemical research became confounded with astrology, mysticism, and all their chimerical relations and incidents,--theories involving the seven planets and the seven metals, the ceremonies of exorcism, the procuring of happiness by the identification of the soul with the Universal Intellect. Attracted by the profits to be obtained from human credulity, a swarm of charlatans sprang up in every community,--prototypes of the impostors who infested the society of Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among these the Jews attained an unenviable notoriety, a reputation destined in subsequent ages to produce most deplorable consequences. Even under the Pharaohs, Hebrew astuteness had succeeded in penetrating the well-guarded arcana of the Egyptian priesthood. It was mainly through their traditional avarice that the precepts and formulas of the Sacred Art, divulged to the Greeks and afterwards to the Arabs, became the property of mediæval Europe. In Mohammedan Spain the Jews excelled in this unpopular but lucrative profession, as they did in every pursuit requiring intelligence, energy, craft, and skill. From this confused medley of philosophy, magic, and imposture were unconsciously obtained results of superlative value to the human race. The adept, poring over his retorts and crucibles in vaulted chambers far removed from inquisitive eyes, stumbled upon discoveries more important than that of the philosopher’s stone. In attempts to accomplish the transmutation of metals, processes were invented by which the analysis, separation, and smelting of ores were, hundreds of years afterwards, facilitated, and the visionary aim of the alchemist, in a measure, accomplished. From these secret experiments came the knowledge of the working of metals, of the composition of alloys, of the fusing of glass, of the application of enamels. Alchemy was thus the precursor of chemistry, and, so intimately are their principles and relations connected, that it is impossible to determine where the false science terminates and where the true science begins. The Hispano-Arabs carried the operations of both to a point not hitherto attained by the experimenters of the ancient world. While they profited largely by the learning of the East, it would be unjust to deny them the merit of conspicuous and striking originality. They practically invented modern chemistry. Their writers describe with clearness and precision the processes of crystallization, sublimation, distillation, filtration, solution. They introduced nitric and sulphuric acids, those powerful solvents, without whose agency chemical combinations could not be effected. To them is due the discovery of alcohol, muriate of ammonia, potassa, bichloride of mercury, nitrate of silver, and phosphorus. The adaptation of these substances to the multifarious purposes of daily existence has bestowed upon the inventor almost boundless resources for the development of the industrial arts, and has provided the surgeon with efficacious means of alleviating human suffering. The use of caustics and acids produced a revolution in medicine, and the skill of the physician, even in Christendom, was no longer classed with the exorcisms of the necromancer or subordinated to the mummeries of the priest. The Moslems of the Peninsula were aware that a calcined metal gains instead of loses weight, a fact whose knowledge foreshadows an acquaintance with gases and the discovery of oxygen; nor were they ignorant of the existence and the properties of hydrogen. Processes for the oxidation of metals and for the generation of gases are first mentioned by Djabar-al-Kufi, or Geber, whose personal history is unknown, and who is often confounded with the mathematician, Djabar-Ibn-Aflah, of Spain. The greatest Arabian chemist of any age, his abilities have been recognized and his name has been mentioned with respect by every investigator of the exact and experimental sciences down to the present day. It has been well said that he bears the same relation to chemistry that Hippocrates does to medicine. His writings--calm, judicious, eminently logical--are not obscured or disfigured by the absurdity and charlatanism of the epoch. Aside from his reference to the generation of gases by heat, and the radical alterations undergone by the substances from which they are derived, his fame would have been permanently established by his discovery of nitric acid and aqua regia, products of the laboratory not previously described by any author. Thus the philosophical methods of the Spanish Moslems gradually developed the visionary operations of alchemy into the science of chemistry. To the latter, however, still clung numerous indications of an origin fraught with imposture. Important experiments were deferred until the planetary influences were declared to be auspicious. The elixir of life was sought for with undiminished ardor. Monarchs were still deluded and plundered by means of fallacious promises of wealth to be obtained by the transmutation of metals. But, in many respects, notable changes were discernible, harbingers of incalculable benefit to both the physical and intellectual condition of humanity. Then was first effected the permanent separation between experimental science and religious mysticism, a union fatal to mental development and to the arts of civilization. From the earliest times, every important undertaking had been invested with a sacred character, and supplemented with ceremonies adopted to avoid publicity and to enhance its mysterious significance. It was no longer accounted sacrilege to explain the secrets of nature or necessary to enshroud the discoveries of the philosopher with the terms of an allegorical jargon. The scientific lectures of the Moorish universities of Spain were open to all students; the analyses of the laboratory were daily performed in the presence of thousands. Familiarity with its operations, experience of its advantageous application, diminished in time the suspicion with which chemistry was viewed by the populace. That science, necessarily slow in its development, originally based upon erroneous principles, profiting by the opportunities of accidental discovery, retarded by innumerable failures, hated by the priesthood, feared by the ignorant, classed as diabolical by the superstitious, was far from possessing the capability for progressive advancement and permanence of which mathematics was susceptible. Although practically its inventors, the Arabs paid more attention to the adaptation of its discovery to medicine than to the improvement of its processes or the purification of its products. This predilection induced them to separate pharmacy from chemistry as well as from medicine, thus creating a new and most important branch of science, of universal application and of practical benefit.

Europe is indebted to the Moslems of Spain and Sicily for the introduction of such drugs as nux vomica, cassia, croton, tamarind, myrrh, sandal, cubebs, ergot, senna, rhubarb, and camphor; for such spices as cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon; for such compounds as juleps, elixirs, syrups, and electuaries, still known to commerce by their Arabic names. Under the khalifs, pharmacies were established in all the principal towns of the empire, subordinated to great central depôts at Toledo and Cordova. These were placed under government supervision, were visited by inspectors, and their owners held accountable for the purity of their commodities and the methods of their preparation. In Sicily the laws were even more stringent: every dispenser of drugs was subjected to a rigid examination as to his qualifications, and the professional oath of the physician required him to denounce to the proper authorities any pharmacist whose wares were inferior in quality to the regular standard. In addition to these salutary precautions against dishonesty and fraud, a scale of prices, publicly displayed, prevented extortion; and violation of the law subjected the offender to serious penalties. These regulations, adopted in the thirteenth century by the Emperor Frederick II., contributed greatly to the success attained by the medical schools of Salerno and Naples, and made Sicily the most famous market for medicaments in the world.

It is a remarkable circumstance that the science of the Saracens was largely diffused among the nations of Northern Europe through the agency of the ecclesiastical order, to whose faith, organization, and traditions it had always evinced an implacable hostility. The general dearth of educational facilities in the Middle Ages, the monopoly by the clergy of such learning as existed, and the fact that, among the latter, would be found, sooner or later, superior minds dissatisfied with the ignorance and the absurdities of the Fathers, were conditions that inevitably tended to this result despite the anathemas of pontiffs and the decrees of synods. Many of these innovators came from the monastic orders. It must not be forgotten that both Savonarola and Bruno were Dominicans. For more than a century there emanated from Toledo translations into Latin of classical works that had long before been rendered from Greek into Arabic. The pioneer of this intellectual movement was Archbishop Raymond, a Frenchman. His example was followed by Herman of Dalmatia, Michael Scott, and John of Seville. The three greatest Christian disseminators of the science derived from the Moors, however, were Albertus Magnus, Bishop of Ratisbon; Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln; and Roger Bacon, professor in the University of Oxford, all of the thirteenth century. The first is popularly known to posterity as an alchemist and a magician. He was, besides, a man of extensive knowledge, and a writer of voluminous treatises on theology, philosophy, alchemy, and chemistry. He described successfully the action of acids, the character of alkalies, the forms and alloys of metals. The method used to-day in the manufacture of caustic potash is identical with the one he recommends. He was the first to prove by sublimation that cinnabar was a compound of sulphur and mercury. He understood perfectly the preparation of acetate of copper, of arsenic, of oxide of lead. The process of refining metals was also familiar to him. He gives the composition of gunpowder,--an invention also attributed to Friar Bacon, but unquestionably due to the Arabs. The idle legends attaching to his name, which have ascribed to him supernatural powers derived from an intercourse with demons, are a part of the homage that mediæval credulity was accustomed to pay to superior intelligence. His life, devoted to science, was as exemplary in its character, in an age of ecclesiastical corruption, as his talents were great and his deeds meritorious. His mathematical knowledge and his mechanical skill were the marvel of his contemporaries. The curious automaton that he constructed, which could open doors and utter guttural sounds, was broken to pieces by St. Thomas Aquinas, who had previously satisfied himself of its magical origin and diabolical character.

Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, eminent alike in scientific attainments and theological controversy, is one of the prominent and interesting characters of English mediæval history. An accomplished scholar, he was profoundly versed in all the learning of his time. Anticipating Wyclif by more than a century, he was not afraid to criticise publicly the abuses of the Papacy, to defy its mandates, and to advocate the exercise of individual judgment in ecclesiastical matters. In these daring innovations we obtain the first glimpse of the audacious spirit which animated the founders of the English Reformation. He resisted successfully the presentation of Italian prelates to the vacant benefices of England, a prerogative hitherto exercised by the See of Rome, almost without remonstrance. He elevated the standard of scholarship at Oxford by introducing the methods of examination which obtained in the University of Paris, at that time the first institution of learning in Christian Europe. Although of distinguished rank in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the unconcealed exultation of the Pope at his decease is a suggestive indication of the broadness of his views, and of the danger to the cause of ecclesiastical supremacy incurred by the extent of his knowledge, the boldness of his sentiments, and the unchecked propagation of his heretical doctrines.

But the greatest of this trio of illustrious names, in both renown and influence, is that of Roger Bacon. Born in 1214, he was early distinguished for his extraordinary abilities. He studied at Oxford and Paris, mastered without difficulty the sciences as taught at those two universities, and, unfortunately for himself, adopted the habit of the Franciscan Order. His inclinations, little in accordance with the maxims of his profession, impelled him to the investigation of natural phenomena. He seems to have had well-defined notions of many practical devices which have contributed largely to the triumphs of modern civilization. He regarded experiment and demonstration as the only rational method of arriving at philosophical truth. A mind endowed with remarkable versatility, a spirit of indomitable perseverance, acquired for him an acquaintance with languages unexampled in his age. In addition to being thoroughly conversant with the classics, Hebrew and Arabic, generally unknown in the thirteenth century except to the Jew and the Saracen, were as familiar to Bacon as the accents of his mother tongue. It is said that he devoted forty consecutive years to the study of science. He expended for rare books and for the apparatus necessary for its researches the sum of two thousand pounds sterling, an amount corresponding to seventy-five thousand dollars of our money. In his writings, he especially recommends the study of mathematics as the most potent instrument of mental culture, the only key which can unlock the secrets of Nature. His erudition embraced the most recondite branches of learning, and some of his suggestions viewed in connection with subsequent discoveries almost seem prompted by supernatural inspiration. He recognized the necessity for the reform of the calendar, and applied to Pope Clement IV. for permission to rectify its errors, but the latter refused. He declared a thorough knowledge of optics to be indispensable for the construction of astronomical instruments. After the perusal of his writings, a doubt can hardly be entertained that he was the inventor of spectacles,--whose idea he obtained from Al-Hazen,--and that he also understood the adjustment of the lenses in the telescope. He explained the phenomena of the rainbow as due to refraction. The power of magnifying-glasses he correctly states to vary with the size of the angle under which the object is seen. He gives the ingredients and describes the effects of gunpowder, a discovery in which he was, however, anticipated by Albertus Magnus. He discourses on the possibilities of inventions similar to the steam-engine, the balloon, and the application of electricity, obscure, it is true, yet with an accuracy of perception that seems incredible, and which cannot be questioned without denying the authenticity of his works. He apparently understood the theory of the suspension-bridge. He refers to the inflammable product obtained by the sublimation of organic matter, probably an allusion to hydrogen. The properties of carbonic acid gas, unfavorable to combustion and fatal to animal life, he mentions in terms whose meaning cannot be misunderstood. He entertained the ancient idea of the compound nature of metals, and declares that, in order to effect their transmutation, a reduction to their primary elements is an essential requisite to success. He explains their artificial coloration, a trick very popular with charlatans, who passed off inferior metals subjected to processes that changed their appearance for silver and gold. The latter metal he asserts to be perfect, because in its formation the operations of countless ages have been completed, and similar processes must be devised by man before he can hope to enter into competition with Nature. In addition to his proficiency in mathematics and chemistry, Bacon was a learned astronomer and a physician. He also constructed automatons, which brought down upon his head the censures of the Church and the enmity of the ignorant. Accused of magic, although he wrote a treatise against it, fanaticism and hatred sentenced him to imprisonment and anathematized his works. After ten years of confinement in a dungeon, he was liberated, only to die with the first return of the blessings of freedom. The intolerant spirit of the age that condemned him is epitomized in a sentence taken from a chapter in which he deplores the irrational bigotry that obstructs the progress of scientific investigation, “Animus ignorans veritatem sustinere non potest.” The versatility of his talents was only surpassed by the audacity with which he attacked and the success with which he controverted the absurd prejudices of his epoch. His name, synonymous with progress, stands forth in prominent contrast with the intellectual abasement and unquestioning credulity with which he was surrounded. His prophetic foresight, while it provoked the ridicule of the thirteenth century, commands alike the respect and astonishment of ours. Like every innovator, he experienced the penalties of superior genius,--persecution, contumely, deprivation of liberty. Among the representative scholars of the Middle Ages, he deserves pre-eminent celebrity as a bold and original exponent of experimental philosophy and scientific thought.

Although unappreciated by his contemporaries, Roger Bacon found a host of imitators during the next three centuries. Members of every rank and profession embraced the study of alchemy. The clerical order included the larger number; the secrecy of the cloister was made subservient to the purposes of magic; and the formulas of the laboratory claimed far more attention than the accomplishment of penance or the ceremonies of devotion. It was even alleged that Pope John XXII. found time at Avignon to engage in a fruitless search for the philosopher’s stone. From these illusory occupations were, as already remarked, occasionally derived discoveries of great practical value. The benefits resulting from the exercise of the spirit of inquiry and the vigorous employment of the intellectual faculties were of even greater consequence to the growth of civilization and the future welfare of mankind.

In no department of scientific investigation was the genius of Arabian culture more signally displayed than in the noble profession of medicine. In ancient Arabia, disease was supposed to be an indication of the anger of God, which it was the peculiar province of the sorcerer to remove. The erroneous ideas of morbific conditions common to nations in their intellectual infancy, among the primitive Arabs, conspicuous for their ignorance, were even more pronounced than was characteristic of other races not less barbarous. It was a long step from the fetichism of the Desert to the sacrificial ceremonies of Rome and the Asclepiads of Greece, yet all were of a similar character, though the latter represented the origin of the medical science of antiquity. Temperance was at once the precaution and the remedy of the abstemious Bedouin. Mohammed diligently inculcated the doctrine that the stomach was the seat of all diseases, and fasting their cure.

The beneficent art which has for its object the alleviation of human suffering was in the seventh century degraded to the vilest purposes of the priest and the charlatan. The writings of the celebrated Greek practitioners, lost in the universal destruction of learning consequent upon barbarian supremacy or hidden in the seclusion of the cloister, had been forgotten. The reputation of the medical school of Alexandria, whose methods had wrought such miracles in the advancement of science, was, in the minds of the more intelligent, but an indistinct and doubtful tradition; to the ignorant it was wholly unknown. Then, and for centuries afterwards, throughout Christendom, medicine was closely allied with sorcery and imposture, partly astrological, partly mystical, but never scientific. The supernatural] character with which ecclesiastical shrewdness and cunning had invested it,--the accepted principle that disease was punishment inflicted for the commission of sin,--a principle which, strange to say, has still its advocates even in our enlightened age,--rendered all progress impossible. Maladies were largely attributed to the influence of spirits or to the possession of devils, to be exorcised by prayer, holy water, the application of relics, the invocation of saints. The superstitions inherited from Pagan antiquity, and of incalculable potency in their action upon the minds of the multitude, were a source of great revenue to the clergy. Among the vast number of holy men whose names fill the pages of the Roman Catholic calendar there were many individuals whose intercession was considered especially efficacious in the treatment of certain diseases. The policy of the Church, which lost no opportunity of impressing the fancy of its votaries, even went so far as to expel from the constellations of the zodiac the familiar forms of the ancients, and to substitute in their stead representations of cenobites and martyrs, the piety of whose lives, often of questionable authenticity, had obtained for them the honor of canonization. The identification of the treatment of disease with religious ceremonial, and indirectly with celestial interference, conferred upon the priesthood a new and formidable weapon of spiritual power. Their influence, already great at the bedside of the sick and the dying, soon became paramount. To the weight which their ecclesiastical functions imposed, they added the dictatorial manner which is essential to the successful ministrations of the physician. They collected enormous fees. They disposed of estates. Often, in the very presence of death, they engaged in unseemly disputes over the division of the spoil. They forced the afflicted to the most humiliating compliances. Profoundly ignorant of the nature of disease and its cure, they supplied their glaring deficiencies by the employment of every resource of imposture known to their calling. By aspersions and the exhibition of the Host they cast out demons. They removed pain with the sovereign virtues of relics. Chronic affections were treated by protracted prayer and vicarious penance. Pilgrimages to sacred localities, supplemented by frequent and generous contributions, were also of notable efficacy. The waters of certain wells and springs under the patronage of a saint, and which had been the scenes of well-attested miracles, were classed among the most popular therapeutic agents. The gift of healing, especially efficacious in cases of goitre and scrofula, with which royal personages were supposed to be endowed, was another of the delusions in which mediæval times were so remarkably prolific. This singular idea, probably of British origin, can be traced to the reign of Edward the Confessor, and was not discarded until the accession of the House of Brunswick. Its institution was undoubtedly ecclesiastical; the repetition of a religious formula accompanied the touch of the sovereign; and the practice of the ceremony at Pentecost was always a source of much edification to the multitude, and of substantial profit to the religious establishment under whose auspices it happened to be conducted.

Side by side with clerical impostors, another class of practitioners, equally ignorant and scarcely less dangerous, preyed upon the superstitious and credulous of mediæval society. These were the charlatans who posed as astrologers, alchemists, magicians. Their encroachments upon the territory of the Church, and the suspicious methods they employed, necessitated a certain degree of concealment and secrecy, but their haunts were well known to their victims. They professed to consult the appearance of the heavens, the motions of the planets, the recurrence of eclipses, the apparition of comets and meteors, in the compounding of medicines and the treatment of distempers. Celestial phenomena were thus regarded as of the highest importance in the determination of symptoms and the administration of remedies. The curative virtues of plants were entirely dependent on the position of the star under which they were gathered. A correspondence of qualities was presumed to exist between objects having the same color or form, an idea possibly as old as man himself. Hence were derived the imaginary aphrodisiacal virtues of the mandrake, and the alleged properties of red and white substances as calorifacients and refrigerants. The occupations of these pretenders, usually confined to the fleecing of their dupes, were, however, not always so innocuous. They were eminently skilled in the composition of love-philters and poisons, whose secret administration is believed to have more than once changed the succession of certain of the royal houses of Europe. The criminal history of the Middle Ages is not more remarkable for the nefarious deeds of these fraudulent practitioners than for the immunity which the possession of dangerous secrets enabled them to enjoy.

To the ministrations of these two classes--that of the ecclesiastic and that of the charlatan--was the health of Christian Europe thus committed for many centuries. A striking similarity characterized the proceedings of both. Each employed mummeries, exorcisms, incantations. Each professed to believe in the efficacy of amulets. One invoked the intercession of the saints; the other was credited with holding nightly intercourse with the spirits of the infernal world. Both, by the alleged exercise of supernatural affiliation, wielded great power, and lived in luxury at the expense of those whom they habitually deluded. While each considered the other as encroaching on his peculiar domain and an object of suspicion, a community of sentiment between them generally prevented any serious outbreak of hostility. The favor and protection of the prince was equally accorded to these two appendages of the court. One was the keeper of the royal conscience; the other was valued as an unscrupulous and ever available instrument of secret vengeance. Both at times exercised the important functions of physician. Unfortunate, indeed, was the invalid dependent upon such inadequate resources. For him there was no prospect of substantial relief; no system of intelligent treatment; no remedies but incense, relics, and the mysterious formulas of imposture; no prophylactic but the talisman; no diagnosis but the consultation of the stars; no prescription but the Pater and the Ave. In the estimation of the populace, the calling of the physician was identical with that of the necromancer. In the advice of the priest the greater confidence was reposed, his connection with the Church investing his opinions with a divine, even an infallible, sanction. When failure resulted, as was often the case, it was not attributed to inexperience and ignorance, but to neglect to propitiate the saints and the Virgin. The commonest rules of hygiene, upon which are absolutely dependent the health of communities, were habitually ignored. The streets were open sewers. The court-yards steamed with miasmatic vapors engendered by decaying garbage. Into most houses the purifying rays of the sun could never penetrate. Floors and walls alike were grimy with filth. Linen and cotton garments worn next the skin, and which contribute so much to personal comfort and cleanliness, were unknown; the Arabs, by whom they were invented, had not yet introduced them to the knowledge of Europe. The supply of water, everywhere contaminated, became a prolific source of infection. Public baths did not exist; a profane luxury of the Pagan and the Saracen, their use was contrary to the traditions of Christianity; the Gospels contain no general precepts for ablution; and its practice was abhorrent to the meditative simplicity of clerical and monastic life. The universal existence of these pathogenic conditions is alone sufficient to account for the rapid diffusion and frightful mortality of contagious diseases. Leprosy had under the filthy habits and promiscuous intercourse of the populations of the Middle Ages assumed a character of extraordinary virulence. France, at that time certainly not the least civilized country of Europe, furnishes a suggestive instance of the prevalence and disastrous effects of this incurable disorder. From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, there was not a village--scarcely a hamlet--without its lazar-house; the streets of great cities swarmed with leprous beggars in every stage of loathsome deformity; and in 1250 there were known to be two thousand leper-asylums in that kingdom,--there were nineteen thousand in Europe. The result of the disregard of sanitary precautions, and the deplorable lack of medical knowledge, is also established by the fatality of great epidemics, previously mentioned. Such was the awful penalty entailed by hatred of learning, personal neglect, and public indifference to the laws of health, conditions sedulously maintained by the policy of the papal system, whose ministers collected immense revenues from shrines, relics, amulets, and the endless paraphernalia of superstition, and discouraged, by all the insidious arts of their profession, every rational method for the prevention and treatment of disease.

In the Orient, on the other hand, great progress had early been made in the various branches of the healing art. The number of Arab physicians was prodigious. An entire volume of the biographical work of Abu-Osaibah is taken up with their names. In the city of Bagdad, at one time during the eleventh century, there were nearly nine hundred. The Nestorian school of Djondisabour had already, in the sixth century, sent forth many eminent practitioners. Some of these, in search of more extensive knowledge, travelled in India; at least one of them, Harets-Ibn-Keladah, an Arab, established himself at Mecca. From him Mohammed, who was his friend, obtained something more than the rudiments of medicine, an accomplishment which contributed greatly to his success. The Prophet attended the sick, gave consultations, and imparted his learning to his wives. He recognized the paramount importance of hygiene, and inculcated its maxims upon every occasion. “God has not caused a single disease to descend upon men without providing a remedy,” “Diet is the principle of cure, and intemperance the source of all physical ills,” were some of the aphoristical sayings whose truth he constantly impressed upon his followers. The renowned Khalif Al-Mamun was the first Moslem prince to impart a decided impulse to the study of scientific medicine. To Bagdad, his capital, which he had named the City of Peace, he attracted, by the promise of magnificent rewards, the chief professors of the medical school of Djondisabour. The fact that they were Christians was in the eyes of that great monarch no impediment to their employment or promotion. Under their intelligent direction colleges and dispensaries were established. The first hospital of which history makes mention was founded at Bagdad. The world was diligently explored for medical treatises of every description. The Greek authors were rendered into Arabic by a body of translators especially employed for that purpose. The vast importance of this intellectual movement, guided by the spirit of scientific inquiry whose conclusions were based on results obtained by observation and experiment, is disclosed by the great minds it produced and through the influence it exerted on other nations.

In medicine, as in all other sciences, the Spanish Arabs enjoyed peculiar advantages. The accumulated wisdom of the Alexandrian School was theirs by right of conquest. The learning, the inventions, and the methods of the great colleges of Djondisabour, of Bagdad, of Cairo, of Damascus, were theirs by appropriation or inheritance. Many of the most accomplished scholars of those institutions established a residence in the Peninsula, and enriched with their knowledge the already gigantic stock of scientific facts, the result of years of study and experiment by the brightest minds in the most highly intellectual and cultivated society of Europe. Neither national nor religious prejudice proscribed the fruits produced by the labors of the philosophical observer. The contributions of the skeptic, the Christian, the Jew, and the Worshipper of Fire were received with the same respect and rewarded with the same liberality as were those of the orthodox Moslem. The enterprising surgeons and pharmacists of Moorish Spain travelled, studied, and pursued their investigations in every country which promised a profitable return to their industry or their researches. The academies of the Peninsula were illumined by the genius and the erudition of such great writers and operators as the Bakhtichous, Masués, and Serapions, the Nestorian pioneers of medicine and surgery; Honein-Ibn-Ishak, Albategnius, Abu-Yusuf-al-Kendi, Tsabit-Ibn-Korra, Ibn-Bothan, Ibn-Sina, Abu-Bekr-Mohammed, of Persia; Ibn-al-Heitsam, Al-Hazen, Abul-Mena-Ibn-Naso, of Egypt; Ibn-al-Mathran, Ibn-al-Dakhnar, Ibn-Khalifa, Abd-al-Atif, Djimal-al-Dire, of Syria; Ibn-al-Djezzar, Constantine Africanus, and Edrisi, of Barbary. These names, famous in the annals of the profession, and gathered from every quarter of the Mohammedan world, are equalled if not surpassed in renown by those of Moorish Spain. The schools in the empire of Islam, already celebrated, were also rendered doubly illustrious by many other distinguished scholars of scarcely inferior ability, whose talents and discoveries produced a revolution in the practice of every department of medical science. All of the institutions where it was taught were not public. Many were established by practising physicians, who had also their private hospitals. The sons adopted the profession of their fathers for many consecutive generations, and added to the learning obtained by example and experience the natural advantages derived from the hereditary transmission of genius and skill.

The khalifs often attended the lectures of eminent practitioners, and always bestowed upon them the most substantial marks of their favor. Capable of the exercise of every public employment, the court physician was often raised to the post of vizier. Many accumulated immense fortunes. Djabril-Ibn-Bakhtichou left ninety million drachmas; Al-Mamum gave Honein for every volume he translated from the Greek its weight in gold.

The versatility of many of these learned men is one of the marvels of the educational system under which their talents were developed. Their medical knowledge was often the least conspicuous of their intellectual accomplishments. They were famous mathematicians, astronomers, metaphysicians, grammarians, botanists. Some left hundreds of works on the different sciences. Even in that remote age there were specialists who wrote with signal ability on the morbid anatomy of the different portions of the body. Affections of the eye, obstetrics, eruptive fevers, were exhaustively treated. The book of Rhazes on the diseases of children is the first on that topic known to exist. Medical encyclopædias were common. The number of translators produced by the school of Bagdad alone exceeded one hundred. The multiplication of copies of Greek medical and philosophical works by this means, and their consequent wide distribution, preserved them from the fate encountered by so many other memorials of Attic genius. The salutary example of the Abbaside khalifs was not lost upon the Moslem princes of Syria and Egypt. In the polished capitals of Damascus and Cairo numbers of splendidly appointed medical institutions--colleges, hospitals, dispensaries, laboratories--arose. The services of the most distinguished physicians were gratuitously rendered to the inmates of the hospitals. The hygienic arrangements of the latter were, in many respects, superior even to those dictated by the spirit of modern scientific progress. They were larger, better arranged, and more commodious. Purity of air was assured by a system of thorough ventilation. There were fountains everywhere,--in the courts, in the halls, in the gardens. Wards placed under the direction of competent specialists were appointed for the treatment and study of every disease. Insane patients were prescribed for like the others, and had their attendants, their baths, and their amusements. For them, as well as for the unfortunate victim of insomnia and the convalescent, there were the diverting mirth of the story-teller and the soothing powers of music. When a patient was discharged as cured from the Moristan of Cairo, founded in the tenth century, and the most luxuriously equipped hospital of ancient or modern times,--where cooling waters rippled by the bedside of the sick, and their senses were refreshed by the sight and odors of beds of flowers,--he received five pieces of gold, to provide for his necessities until his strength was completely restored. These institutions were supported by the government, and placed under the supervision of the court physician, the head of his profession, who was held to a strict accountability for their proper management. For this important and responsible employment belief in Islamism was by no means essential; honesty, skill, and industry were the sole recommendations to imperial favor, and the medical advisers of the Successors of the Prophet were frequently Christians and Jews. In all hospitals registers of cases were opened and preserved, and far more importance was attached to the observations made at the bedside of the patient than to the information obtained by the perusal of books.

The fame of the medical colleges of the Orient spread rapidly throughout the world, and attracted the ambitious of every creed,--Christian, Hebrew, Mohammedan. In the eleventh century there were more than six thousand students of medicine in the schools of Bagdad. The methods of the professors and writers who directed the policy of these institutions owed their efficacy and success to their severely practical character. No course of treatment was approved until it had been repeatedly tested. Rhazes boasted that his knowledge had been acquired in hospitals and not from libraries. It was the leading principle of the practice of Ibn-Zohr that the resources of nature, if properly directed, are generally sufficient to cure disease. Abulcasis insisted that a thorough knowledge of anatomy was indispensable to success in surgical practice, a statement which, in his day, had the merit of novelty. The original principles of science transmitted from the great Greek physicians were again promulgated for the benefit of mankind, after having been divested of the mass of superstition and imposture with which they had long been encumbered. Almost every disease incident to humanity was treated by the Arab practitioner. Ophthalmia, endemic in countries subjected to the incessant glare of a tropical sun, received particular attention. The Moorish surgeons describe eleven different operations for cataract. Smallpox and leprosy were the subject of protracted and exhaustive investigation. There were specialists for affections of the nerves and the brain, and of the pectoral organs; for complaints resulting from physical excesses; for the various forms of insanity. Considerations of delicacy and the jealous prejudice resulting from the life of the harem debarred the physician from the application of the principles of gynæcology, and the practice of obstetrics was relinquished to women. Surgery, whose practice now implies the possession of the highest degree of professional skill, was for ages among the Arabs considered of inferior importance, and was abandoned to barbers and charlatans. The Mohammedan doctrine that the soul remained with the body for a certain time after dissolution was a serious obstacle to the acquisition of anatomical knowledge, vital to the success of the operator. This feeling was intensified by an idea prevalent among the rabble that handling a corpse was a source of frightful, nay, even of ineffaceable, pollution. The same impediments to the study of anatomy also existed in Christian Europe under the rules of the Church. One of the most heinous offences of the Emperor Frederick II. was that he encouraged dissections, a practice which, as it violated the sacred tabernacle of the soul and, according to ecclesiastical precept, might cause serious embarrassment on the day of the General Resurrection, had been rigidly proscribed by the policy of Rome.

The Arabs attached the greatest importance to hygienic precautions for the prevention as well as for the cure of disease. It was a cardinal principle of their pathology that overtaxing the digestive organs was the cause of a multitude of disorders. The abstemious and temperate habits which characterized the life of the Desert were impressively inculcated by the Koran and the entire body of Moslem tradition. Their observance was constantly suggested by the familiar use of amusing and pertinent aphorisms and proverbial phrases, such, for instance, as, “The worst things that an old man can have are a young wife and a good cook.”

The science of medicine, in common with the other branches of practical knowledge already enumerated, was introduced into Christendom through the Moslem kingdoms of Southern Europe. The Spanish and Sicilian Arabs were the distributors of the accumulated wisdom of the East. The munificent patronage of their rulers, the enterprise of their merchants, the ambition of their scholars, enabled them to profit by the literary resources and invaluable observations of the great medical schools of Bagdad, Cairo, and Damascus. The Continent of Rhazes, the Canon of Avicenna, the Meliki of Ali-Ibn-Abbas, each a vast compendium of scientific information, whose principles form the basis of all modern practice, were early familiar to the Moorish physicians of the Peninsula. The works of Al-Hazen and Ali-Ibn-Issa, indispensable to oculists, were used by the students of Cordova even before their adoption by the colleges of Teheran and Cairo. Every medical treatise of importance was to be found in the libraries of the khalifate. Nor were the efforts of the Hispano-Arab practitioners limited to the collection of the literary productions of their professional brethren of the Orient. They translated the ancient Greek masters. They composed voluminous commentaries on famous authors whose opinions were regarded as oracular. No names in the long catalogue of Moslem genius stand higher than those of Abulcasis, the originator of modern surgery; than Avenzoar, whose family was prominent for three hundred years in the medical annals of Moorish Spain; than Averroes, whose great professional attainments have been obscured by his pre-eminent reputation as a natural philosopher. Arib-Ibn-Said-al-Khatib, whose works exceeded a thousand in number, composed treatises on gynæcology and obstetrics, and was the author of the Calendar of Cordova, a wonderful compilation of medical truths, surgical maxims, astronomical and agricultural knowledge. Ibn-Wafed, of Toledo, who lived in the tenth century, and whose extraordinary abilities made him conspicuous among hundreds of eminent contemporaries, consumed twenty years in the preparation of his work on the general practice of medicine. Ibn-Zohr, of Seville, was the first to discover that scabies was produced by a diminutive parasite, and to prescribe sulphur as a remedy. The treatise of Mohammed-Ibn-Quassum on diseases of the eye occupied six hundred pages; that of Mohammed-al-Temini on hernia and tumors nearly four hundred. Daoud-al-Agrebi wrote on fumigations, collyriums, hemostatics; he recommends the administration of narcotics in lithotomy, in the incision of abscesses, and in emasculation for the production of eunuchs. Saladin-Ibn-Yusuf published a book on the anatomy of the eye and the theories of vision. The scientific and logical methods inaugurated by the khalifs of the East were perfected in the medical colleges of Mohammedan Spain. The study of anatomy attained a development previously unknown to the traditions and experience of the profession. From the contemplation of bone-heaps in the cemeteries the student advanced to the performance of autopsies; to the determination, by actual survey, of the location and offices of the internal organs; to the vivisection of quadrupeds and criminals. A material advance in general intelligence is implied from the fact that these inquiries, heretofore so repugnant to popular feeling and religious tradition, could be prosecuted in peace. In etiology, pathology, therapeutics, great progress was made. Surgery, whose practice had entailed reproach rather than distinction upon its professors, was, by the removal of the prejudice attaching to anatomical demonstration, relieved of the obloquy with which it was generally regarded. A blind reverence for precedent and authority was not recognized by the practitioners of the Hispano-Arab school. They inculcated the paramount importance of a competent knowledge of the functions of the organs of the human body, which they well knew could only be obtained from the practice of dissection, abhorrent to the minds of both the Moslem and the Jew. They advised great caution in all operations. Every new theory was subjected to severe and exhaustive tests. Heroic treatment was adopted only where milder means had proved unsuccessful. Whenever possible, the curative powers of nature were allowed full exercise; and a change of climate, especially in pulmonary affections, was one of the principal resources of the Moorish physicians. Their works were elucidated by the introduction into the text of drawings of instruments adapted to the removal of the morbid conditions described; and science is indebted to the Spanish Moslems for this innovation, now an essential part of all treatises on surgery. The treatment of the eye received more attention from the Arabs than any other branch of the profession. Their oculists were most accomplished operators; the heat and dryness of the climate being favorable to ophthalmic affections and affording the surgeon varied and incessant practice. They enumerate nine different forms of cataract, which they treated by couching and by puncture. Their needles were both round and triangular; some were hollow and made of glass. The Arabs were the first to perform the important operation of lithotomy and to reduce old dislocations. They knew how to ligature the arteries four centuries before Ambrose Paré. They used hooks for the extraction of polypi. They made frequent and intelligent use of counter-irritants. The seton is their invention. The application of leeches in apoplexy was a common incident in their practice. They were familiar with the effects of caustics and acids as escharotics. They substituted refrigerants for tonics in certain affections of the nerve-centres. They understood the value of cold water in arresting hemorrhage. They originated the modern method of bandaging. The treatment of slow fevers, like typhoid, by baths of low temperature, was frequently employed by them; it was recommended by Rhazes nine hundred years before its announcement to the present generation as a new and remarkable discovery. To Ibn-Zohr medical science owes the operation of tracheotomy and the original description of pericarditis. Abulcasis, in explaining lithotomy, advises the section used by surgeons ever since he wrote, in the tenth century. Nor had the advantages derived from anæsthesia escaped the notice of these profound and ingenious observers. They suggest the administration, in decoction, of darnel--the Lolium Temulentum--and other plants of narcotic properties, until complete loss of consciousness and sensation is obtained, to facilitate the performance of severe operations. Even the results of microbial infection appear to have been recognized by them, although its cause remained unknown. When, in the tenth century, Rhazes was directed by the Khalif to select a hospital site in the city of Bagdad, he caused pieces of meat to be suspended in different localities, and the building was erected in that place where, after a given time, the least putrefaction was visible. Nor in that early day was the care of animals neglected, and the name of Abu-Bekr-Ibn-Bedr has descended to posterity as that of a famous veterinary surgeon.

In their contributions to the pharmacopœia, the Spanish Mohammedans rendered invaluable services to medicine. Abul-Abbas, of Seville, was the first to apply the principles of botanical science--heretofore principally devoted to agriculture--to the purposes of the apothecary and the physician. In the work of Ibn-al-Awam six hundred plants possessing medicinal properties are enumerated; in that of Ibn-Beithar more than three hundred, hitherto unclassified or unknown, are mentioned and described. Ibn-Essouri, in his work on the Materia Medica, painted the herbs which had been the subject of his investigations not only as they grew, but as they appeared, when dried, on the shelves of the druggist; his is the first example of an Arabic book illustrated in colors. The methods of the Moorish practitioners were conservative. They attempted no doubtful or hazardous experiments. They discarded the drastic remedies of the ancients. Profoundly versed in the science of horticulture, they watered the roots of plants and trees with strong infusions of purgative drugs, and afterwards administered their fruits. Their personal attention to the rules of hygiene was often evidenced by their remarkable longevity. Rhazes was in active practice at Bagdad for more than half a century; Abulcasis attained the great age of one hundred and one years.

The superior excellence of the Spanish-Arab school is attributable to the fact that its members devoted their talents to a single profession. For the most part, they avoided the example of the Oriental, whose medical researches were hampered by philosophical speculations, and who turned from the diagnosis of ailments and the application of remedies to the fascinations of alchemy and to vagaries concerning the imaginary relations of humanity to the mysterious influence of the stars. They were not altogether free from these delusions, nevertheless, for they pulverized jewels, supposed to be efficacious in certain diseases, and coated their drugs with gold and silver leaf, a proceeding which to the adept had a profound alchemical significance. From this custom is derived our expression, “to gild the pill.” They usually, however, confined their observations to the legitimate sphere of the physician--to the subjects of medicine, surgery, pharmacy, hygiene.

The various topical applications used at present by the profession--such as unguents, plasters, counter-irritants, and pomades--originated in Mohammedan Spain. The hospital service of that country has received little attention from historians, but it is highly improbable that, in the general advance of civilization, this important auxiliary to medicine should have been at all neglected. It is a singular fact that the only detailed notice of a Moorish hospital in the Peninsula is of that of Algeziras, which was founded in the twelfth century. Tradition reports, however, that fifty public institutions of this kind existed at one time at Cordova. The Hispano-Arab practitioners held consultations at the bedside of the patient; some, employed by the government, visited the sick of remote localities at regular intervals; for the poor there was gratuitous attendance and treatment. The discoveries of Arab medicine were mainly preserved and diffused through the translations of Gerard of Cremona, whose indefatigable industry imposed such lasting obligations on modern science. For fifty years he was employed at Toledo, until his translations reached the enormous number of seventy-six. Had it not been for his efforts, and those of his patient collaborators, the works of the Moorish physicians would have shared the fate of the voluminous collections of Arabic miscellaneous literature. Of the millions of volumes which represented the intellectual glory of the khalifate scarcely a copy exists in Spain. What escaped the malignant vigilance of Ximenes perished at the hands of the Inquisition. It is not generally known that the bulk of the manuscripts of the Escorial library constitutes no part of the literary inheritance of the Moslem domination. They represent the spoil of vessels captured on the coast of Morocco in the early part of the seventeenth century. In nearly all of these the invocation of Allah and Mohammed, with which every important Arabic work begins, has been carefully erased.

Of such a character were the literary and scientific achievements of the Arabs, whose highest mental development was reached under the influence of the Mohammedan dynasties of the Peninsula. In the fierce and relentless struggle prosecuted for centuries between pontifical iniquity and intolerance and Moslem learning, the former ultimately triumphed. It may not be inappropriate at the close of this chapter to recount the consequences of that triumph; to disclose the aims of the victor; to enumerate the sacrifices of the vanquished; to contrast the effects of the supremacy of either upon the welfare of humanity and the march of civilization. From the Arabian Prophet, reared amidst the pastoral simplicity and barbaric ignorance of the Desert, came such utterances as these,--utterances which, if not inspired, are yet certainly of priceless value to the human race: “Teach science: whoever teaches it fears God; whoever desires it adores God; whoever speaks of it praises God; whoever diffuses it distributes alms; whoever possesses it becomes an object of veneration and respect. Science preserves us from error and from sin; it illuminates the road to Paradise; it is our protector in travel, our confidant in the Desert, our companion in solitude. It guides us through the pleasures and the sorrows of life; it serves us alike as an ornament among our friends and as a buckler against our enemies; it is through its instrumentality that the Almighty raises up those whom he has appointed to determine the good and the true. The memories of such men are the only ones which shall survive, for their noble deeds will serve as models for the imitation of the great minds that shall come after them. Science is a potent remedy for the infirmities of ignorance, a brilliant beacon in the night of injustice. The study of letters is as meritorious as fasting; their communication is not inferior in efficacy to prayer; in a generous heart they awaken the most elevated sentiments; to the wicked they impart the corrective and humanizing precepts of virtue.” These words, spoken by Mohammed in the seventh century, were received by the votaries of Islam with the respect due to a revelation destined to guide their policy, with reference to literary pursuits, through all subsequent ages.

Far different was the attitude assumed by the ecclesiastical power whose despotic mandates were for a thousand years recognized and obeyed by the proudest sovereigns of Christendom. It early perceived the incompatibility of its pretensions with the untrammelled exercise of the faculties of the human intellect. Founded upon principles whose acceptance, as maxims of divine origin, necessarily precluded all ideas of improvement and progress, it had no resource but quiescence; it could countenance no condition but that of immobility. It placed a premium upon ignorance, and enjoined the employment of persecution as a virtue. It blighted every noble aspiration which came within the sphere of its destructive energy. Through the oracular mouths of the Fathers it denounced all philosophy as “empty and false.” In its Constitution of Faith, promulgated in the nineteenth century by the Vatican Council,--many of whose articles are indorsed as sound by every consistent member of the Evangelical Communion,--it anathematized all “who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine.”

Such were the various aspects under which scientific thought was regarded respectively by the Founder of Islam and the infallible representatives of Christianity. The effects of such spiritual admonitions upon the physical condition of those subjected to their influence are disclosed by the material and intellectual prosperity or debasement of nations. In no examples of the political and economic life of the Middle Ages or of subsequent times are such striking, such incredible, contrasts exhibited as in the annals of Mohammedan Spain and Catholic Europe. In the tenth century Andalusia was traversed in every direction by magnificent aqueducts; Cordova was a city of fountains; its thoroughfares, for a distance of miles, were brilliantly illuminated, substantially paved, kept in excellent repair, regularly patrolled by guardians of the peace. In Paris there were no pavements until the thirteenth century; in London none until the fourteenth; the streets of both capitals were receptacles of filth, and often impassable; at night shrouded in inky darkness; at all times dominated by outlaws; the haunt of the footpad, the nursery of the pestilence, the source of every disease, the scene of every crime. It was not until the close of the reign of Charles II. that even a defective system of street lighting was adopted; in London the mortality of the plague is a convincing proof of the unsanitary conditions that everywhere prevailed; the supply of water was derived from the polluted river or from wells reeking with contamination. Nor did time and experience bring to the public mind a realization of the importance of improvements vitally affecting the health and convenience of every community. As late as 1825, water of doubtful purity was hawked about from door to door in the city of New York; a solitary wooden pump in Chatham Street sufficed for the general necessities of the poor; sewage was carried in tubs on the heads of negroes and thrown into the river; and only three hundred lamps and gas-jets diffused their uncertain and flickering glare through the squares and avenues of the metropolis of the western world.

The annual receipts of the state from all sources under Abd-al-Rahman III. in the first half of the tenth century exceeded three hundred million dollars; the revenues of the English Crown at the close of the seventeenth century were fifteen million; those of the United Provinces less than eighteen million; those of France sixty million, estimated at the present value of money. At the decease of this Moorish sovereign in 961, there were found in the royal coffers five million pieces of gold, equal to one hundred million dollars. When Louis XIV., the greatest potentate of his time, died in 1715, the treasury of France was bankrupt. The inhabitants of England at the death of Elizabeth were about four million; the population of Moorish Spain six centuries previous to that date could not have been less than thirty million, and was probably nearer fifty. In 1700, London, the most populous city of Christian Europe, was only half as large as Cordova was in 900, when Almeria and Seville had each as numerous a population as the capital of the British Empire eight hundred years afterwards. At the dawn of the eleventh century the Moslem dominions of Sicily and Spain presented a picture of universal cultivation and consequent prosperity, where industry was promoted and idleness was punished; where an enlightened spirit of humanity had provided asylums within whose walls the infirm and the aged might pass their remaining days in comfort and peace. Six hundred years afterwards what are now the richest and most valuable agricultural districts of Great Britain were unclaimed and uninhabitable bog and coppice, abandoned to game and frequented by robbers; and one-fourth of the inhabitants of England, incapable of the task of self-support, were during the greater part of the year dependent upon public charity, for which purpose a sum equal to one-half of the revenues of the crown was annually disbursed. In the middle of the tenth century there were nine hundred public baths in the capital of Moorish Spain; in the eighteenth century there were not as many in all the countries of Christian Europe. In the eighth century, the cottages occupied by the lower classes of the Spanish Moslems were embowered in roses, were surrounded by fields of waving grain and orchards of luscious fruits, were furnished with all the comforts and many of the luxuries of life; in the sixteenth century, the peasantry of France and Germany, ill-clad, begrimed with filth, and ignorant of the taste of bread, were living in squalid huts, sleeping upon reeking heaps of straw, drinking the waters of pond and morass, and feeding on carrots and acorns. Seven centuries after the cities of the Peninsula had been drained by a system of great sewers, their streets kept free from rubbish, and subjected to daily cleansing, Paris was still worthy of its ancient appellation of Lutetia, “The Muddy;” the way of the pedestrian was blocked by heaps of steaming offal and garbage; and droves of swine, the only scavengers, roamed unmolested through court-yard and thoroughfare.

Under the conditions of intellectual culture which characterized Moslem and Christian society even a greater inequality prevailed. The library of Mostandir, Sultan of Egypt, contained eighty thousand volumes; that of the Fatimites of Cairo, a million; that of Tripoli, two hundred thousand; in the thirteenth century, when Bagdad was sacked by the Mongols, the books cast into the Tigris completely covered its surface, and their ink dyed its waters black, while a far greater number were destroyed by fire; the public collections of the Moorish khalifate of Spain were seventy in number, and the great library of Al-Hakem II. alone included six hundred thousand volumes. The collections of many private individuals were proportionately large. In that of Ibn-al-Mathran, the physician of Saladin, were ten thousand manuscripts; upon the shelves of Dunasch-ben-Tamin, the great Jewish surgeon of Cairo, were more than twenty thousand. Four centuries afterwards few books existed in Christian Europe excepting those preserved in monasteries; the royal library of France consisted of nine hundred volumes, two-thirds of which were theological works; their subjects were limited to pious homilies, the miracles of saints, the duties of obedience to ecclesiastical superiors,--their sole merit consisted in the elegance of their chirography and the beauty of their illuminations. During the Hispano-Arab domination it was difficult to encounter even a Moorish peasant who could not read and write; during the same period in Europe many great personages could not boast these accomplishments. From the ninth to the thirteenth century the Spanish-Arabs possessed an educational system not inferior to the most improved ones of modern times; they taught astronomy from globes and planispheres; they measured the circumference of the earth; they observed the motions of the planets; they calculated the density of the atmosphere; they were familiar with the natural and artificial conditions under which vapors and gases are generated. For the European of that epoch there were no schools, for popular learning was discountenanced as conducive to heresy; education was confined to the cloister; the stars were but celestial lamps, whose only office was the nocturnal illumination of the earth; the latter was flat, and above it rose, in regular gradation, the seven regions of heaven; the ebullition and the explosion of gases were attributed to demoniac influence and to the agency of mischievous imps and goblins. Five centuries after the Moorish physicians of Spain had treated disease by the rational principles of medicine, surgery, and hygiene, Europe still adhered to the archaic conceptions of barbaric ignorance; to the belief that all illness was a manifestation of divine displeasure; to the possession by evil spirits; to the delusive expedients of priestly artifice,--the exhibition of relics, the muttering of texts, the performance of exorcisms. Six hundred years after the celebrated astronomer, Ibn-Junis--who constructed the Hakemite Table, advanced proofs of the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and utilized the pendulum for the purposes of chronometry--was honored and awarded with the friendship of the Khalif of Egypt, Galileo, in the degrading robe of the penitent, horrible with painted flames and devils, was forced, kneeling before the familiars of the Holy Office, to abjure, as dangerous heresies, the scientific truths he had subjected to mathematical and ocular demonstration,--the grand discoveries which have made his name immortal; and Bruno was sent to the stake for admitting the philosophical doctrine of the all-pervading Divine Essence, for teaching the heresy of a plurality of worlds, and for insisting that the earth revolved on its axis and round the sun. Seven hundred years after universal toleration was enforced throughout the domain of the Ommeyade Khalifate,--where even the populace had learned to respect the weaknesses of senile eccentricity, and the belief in demoniacal possession had been contemptuously abandoned to the most ignorant of the provincial rabble,--the Duke of York was subjecting the unhappy Covenanters of Scotland to promiscuous massacre and to the excruciating torture of the boot, and Cotton Mather was burning witches on Salem Common. More than twenty generations had elapsed since the Arab geographer was first regarded by his countrymen as a public benefactor, by his king as worthy of the highest honors that royalty can bestow, by the learned with the respect attaching to the possessor of unusual attainments; when Calvin tortured Servetus at Geneva for publishing the unscriptural assertion that Palestine, so far from being a land flowing with milk and honey, was, in fact, a barren waste of volcanic desolation,--Servetus, the great anatomist, who came within a hair’s-breadth of anticipating Harvey in his discovery of the circulation of the blood. From time immemorial among unenlightened races insanity has been attributed to the influence of malignant spirits, who could only be expelled by the unsparing use of the scourge or by the intervention of the priest. The Arabs were the first of nations to discard this idea, to use kindness and the administration of remedies in the treatment of the demented, and to establish asylums.

These conditions disclose the comparative value of two great politico-religious systems, both claiming divine authority, each uniting in its head the functions of Church and State,--one the exponent and zealous promoter of every scientific impulse, the other the ever-consistent representative of intellectual repression. The influence of Moslem genius is felt to-day in the numerous inventions, the insatiable thirst for knowledge, the marvellous development of art, science, and letters which have made the closing years of the nineteenth century ever memorable in the annals of civilization. Apparently extinguished by the noxious vapors of superstition that had darkened the Christian world for so many ages, the vital spark of learning still remained, which, rekindled in an epoch more propitious to mental culture, was destined to advance in an even more marked degree the material interests, as well as the most noble aspirations, of mankind. The law of human progress even under the most unfavorable conditions is constant, invariable, eternal. Its manifestations differ only in the degree of their advancement. The latter may be checked, but its retardation is only temporary. The ground lost by scientific truth in one century it will surely make up in the next, and, despite the hostile agencies which may conspire for its suppression, it is destined eventually to triumph.

The consideration of Arabic intellectual life, and especially of its culmination in the Spanish Peninsula, the astonishing energy, curiosity, and perseverance that characterized every stage of its development from its very origin to its extinction, the phenomenal rapidity of its advance, the superhuman greatness of its deeds, suggest the infinite possibilities to which its revival may ultimately give rise as affecting the destiny of nations.

At the present day, when every year, nay, almost every month, brings forth some new and wonderful discovery; when vocal communication between distant points is maintained solely by atmospheric aid; when chemistry is resolving into numerous constituents substances for ages considered elementary; when by the employment of enormous lenses the heavenly bodies are brought within almost tangible propinquity to the earth; when even the most humble offices of domestic economy are performed by the mysterious agency of electrical apparatus; when the invention of tremendously powerful means of destruction daily renders war more difficult and peace more desirable; when the gases of the atmosphere are artificially decomposed and separately made the objects of commercial traffic; when the skill of the physician has practically eradicated diseases long deemed incurable; in this era of scientific progress and of unparalleled intellectual achievement who will be so bold as to assert that even the dreams of the alchemist, the cherished phantoms of Moorish imagination, may not soon be realized? In scores of laboratories in Europe and America there are to-day chemists, diligently and quietly, with the patience, if not with the enthusiasm, of the ancient adept, endeavoring to determine by the aid of the prodigious resources of modern science the ever doubtful question of the transmutation of metals. From all quarters of the civilized world come well-authenticated reports that some of the greatest minds of the century, minds whose every utterance claims attention and respect, are engaged in investigations whose effects may surpass those of the imagined universal panacea, and which will impart to the listless energy, to the deformed symmetry, and to hoary and decrepit age the strength of long departed manhood;

“Lumenque Juventæ Purpureum.”

Is it too much to assume that our age, so prolific of marvels that what excites astonishment to-day is certain to become commonplace to-morrow, will accomplish these and even greater results; an age ingenious in theory, fertile in invention, phenomenal in versatility, skilful in practice; an age of eccentric and startling propositions; an age which looks forward with audacious confidence to the solution of even that most recondite problem of biology, the artificial production of organic life? Is it unreasonable to expect that those secrets of nature which have hitherto eluded the researches of philosophical experiment and scientific inquiry will erelong be revealed?

These being among the assumed possibilities of science, let us turn to what it has actually done for mankind. In what respect are these investigations preferable to that absolute resignation to ecclesiastical authority which so generally prevailed when devotion was exalted and intelligence enchained? What advantage has resulted from this poring over manuscripts, this collecting of plants, this delving in the earth, this star-gazing, this mixing of acids, this study of skeletons? Cui bono?

The answer comes back from every phase of an advancing civilization, from the din of a thousand workshops and the clatter of a million looms; from the whistle of the locomotive in the desert and the bell of the steamer stranded amidst the polar ice; from the network of railways seaming each continent from centre to circumference; from canal and aqueduct, from tunnel and bridge, and all the grand monuments of civil engineering; from the safety-lamp, flickering through the poisonous vapors of the miner’s cave; from the seats of commerce crowded with the appliances of enjoyment and luxury; from the harbors with their forests of shapely masts; from the innumerable triumphs of inventive genius which alike increase the pleasures of the wealthy and ease the burdens of the poor, and are gratefully felt at the desk of the speculative philosopher and the bench of the artisan. But even more than this has science accomplished. It has explored new regions in the boundless domain of human knowledge. It has discovered and applied the laws of planetary motion; determined the distances of the heavenly bodies; estimated their masses; laid down the substances of which they are composed; and described the complex relations in which they stand to each other. It has measured time down to the incredibly small fraction of the millionth part of a second. It has scanned the borders of the universe, and brought within the scope of vision stars so distant that the image formed to-day upon the retina of the observer is produced by light emitted five million years ago. By means of the microscope, it has opened a fairy world teeming with myriad types of animal and vegetable life, more curious than the fabled regions of the Orient, more wonderful than the enchanted garden of Armida. It has placed upon the photographic negative faces, flowers, landscapes, depicted in the exquisite and harmonious colors of Nature. By the discovery of the radiferous salts,--polonium, radium, thorium, actinium, titanium,--it has disclosed to the chemist a new and enchanting field of research, whose extent and possibilities cannot yet even be made the subject of intelligent conjecture; and has instituted the study of substances whose astonishing properties tend to overthrow the hitherto well-founded theories of the various relations of matter, and, in some instances, to imperatively demand their modification or radical reconstruction; whose investigation has established as truisms the most glaring apparent physical paradoxes; in the presence of whose marvellous effects the properties of solidity, cohesion, and opacity seem to vanish; which exhibit such a subdivision of matter into infinitesimal particles as to suggest their practical dissociation, and in comparison with whose dimensions the inconceivably minute primordial atoms of Democritus are absolutely colossal; the origin of whose mysterious power no hypothesis, no analysis, no apparatus, has so far been able to satisfactorily determine; which not improbably may afford solutions of cosmical phenomena whose manifestations alone have been observed; and which, by their application to anatomical, medical, and mechanical science, may ultimately serve to explain the origin of life, and confer inestimable material benefits upon the human race. Of these metallic, radio-active bodies, radium, the most important and wonderful, is one that presents pre-eminently interesting and inexplicable peculiarities; a substance which possesses the remarkable qualities of self-luminosity, thermogenesis, and actinism; which is endowed with a singular recuperative power, by means of which its recently diminished force is restored without the apparent aid of any external agency; whose primary and apparently inexhaustible source of potency has been variously and inconclusively asserted to be the sun, the earth, the atmosphere; whose emanations, charged with negative electricity, impart the latter to the solid, liquid, or gaseous medium through which they pass, and communicate temporary phosphorescence and permanent coloring to objects subjected to their impact; whose rays travel with such inconceivable velocity that they would traverse a distance equal to five times the circumference of the earth in a single second; which have mass as well as energy; which, despite the enormous rapidity with which they move, may be instantaneously deflected from a direct to a curvilinear path by the interposition of a magnet; and by whose aid photographs may readily be taken through thick plates of lead and iron. Science has invented explosives that rend mountains asunder; by the application of the carbon point, it has caused the hardest steel to fluidize in the twinkling of an eye. From the black and glutinous refuse of gas manufacture, it has extracted pigments whose tints vie in brilliancy with those of the rainbow, and remedial agents which in certain departments have revolutionized the practice of medicine. It has perfected the transmission of light, so that by the mere touching of a button great cities are in an instant illuminated. With no small degree of probability, it has suggested that incessant and universal molecular activity, pervading all matter both organic and inorganic, may be the controlling principle of the mysterious condition which we designate as life, and that the weight of every substance is in an inverse ratio to its atomic energy. It has made objects hitherto opaque transparent, and has opened to the view of the surgical operator the inmost recesses of the human body. It has removed without apparent injury organs whose functions were long considered indispensable to animal existence. By simple manipulation it has cured congenital deformities formerly considered hopeless, and restored distorted limbs to their normal strength and symmetry. It has discovered the specific pathogenic bacteria which produce many diseases, and rendered them innocuous by means of their own cultures. Through the injection of an extract obtained from a glandular secretion it has prolonged the pulsations of the heart in an animal for hours after decapitation; by rhythmic compression it has restored the action of that organ after it had completely ceased--when life was practically extinct.

Science has told us that the clear blue of the firmament, seemingly of spotless purity, is caused by floating particles of atmospheric dust; that every twig, and leaf, and blade of grass--even every newly-fallen drop of rain--are radiferous centres of electric energy; that motion is the rule, and quiescence the exception, affecting the component atoms of the universe,--if, indeed, quiescence at all exists; that the parasite, infesting the body of the smallest of insects, is itself the abode of minute organisms; that the very air we breathe is swarming with the germs of suffering, disease, and death. It has pressed into its service the imponderable agents, and demonstrated their interconvertibility; has bestowed priceless blessings upon the living; has soothed the pillow of languishing humanity, and extended its welcome offices even to the grave. It has given us an idea of the duration of our globe, and established a system of chronology the immensity of which we endeavor in vain to comprehend, where centuries are as nothing, and cycles but fleeting periods of time. From a single fossil bone it has reproduced the form and described the habits of the monster to which, in prehistoric ages, it belonged. It has measured the movement of thought, which, despite its proverbial rapidity, has been proved to be only about one hundred feet a second. By investigation of the mental phenomena of hypnotism and telepathy, it has added to the evidence which tends to establish the existence of the Soul of the World. It has taught all to exert the proudest prerogatives of intelligence,--to think, to doubt, to reason,--and has rescued the mind of man long buried beneath the accumulated absurdities of venerable tradition. These great results it has achieved in its childhood, under adverse influences, opposed by the fanatical and the ignorant, with its devotees menaced by the dungeon, the scaffold, and the fires of the Inquisition; but who, with that stern, unflinching perseverance which at last reaps its reward in the tardy honors of posterity, have pursued their way, conscious of the nobility of their calling, and fortified by the reflections of that sublime philosophy which “looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.”

Society has progressed far beyond that intellectual stage when the comet was dreaded as a harbinger of universal misfortune; when the appearance of the pestilence was considered a manifestation of the wrath of the Almighty; when superstitious fear transformed every floating mist into a cloak for goblins; regarded every rustling of the foliage as an evidence of supernatural presence; saw in every ebullition of gaseous water a mysterious phenomenon, in every subterranean rumble an omen of sinister and portentous augury. This emancipation of the human intellect, this impetus to every expression of material progress, cannot be attributed to ecclesiastical inspiration. They were not a product of the Crusades. They were not the effect of the Reformation. They are not the work of Christianity, whose policy has indeed been constantly inimical to their toleration or encouragement. They are a legitimate consequence of the liberal policy adopted and perpetuated by the Ommeyade Khalifs throughout their magnificent empire, whose civilization was the wonder, as its power was the dread, of mediæval Europe.

Modern science unquestionably owes everything to Arab genius. From the mass of debased superstitions, mummeries, and fetichism, entertained and cultivated by the Bedouin, emerged, as has been seen, a thorough knowledge of the mutual relations of the different parts of the Universe and a familiarity with the wonderful phenomena of Nature. From the study of astrology astronomy was evolved; from alchemy, chemistry; from geomancy, geography; from magic, natural philosophy. The principles of government by law were established. Anthropomorphism was discarded. It was no longer attempted to control the inexorable operation of physical agencies by prayers and incantations. In one especially important respect the Moslems differed from their European predecessors. The Roman system and the Gothic polity were founded entirely upon force; Arabic power was largely controlled by intellectual conditions.

With this great people the love of scientific investigation was an absorbing passion. It pervaded every department of government, every occupation of life, every branch of study; it even invaded the sanctuaries of religion. The cultivation of letters, the prosecution of experiments, were, for eight centuries, the most prominent characteristics of the Arab race, the highest distinction of Mussulman sovereigns. It is far from creditable to modern civilization, indebted for its existence to these pursuits, to ignore such claims to gratitude and renown, through prejudice against the religious principles of those who engaged in them. Surely in all literature there exists no nobler or more elevated sentiment than that expressed in the saying of Mohammed, “A mind without culture is like a body without a soul, and glory does not consist in riches, but in knowledge.”