Volume 3 — CHAPTER XXVIII THE HISPANO-ARAB AGE OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 760–1450 (continued 2)

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;

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.”