THE ARAB3. 219 



ancient teclniical arts of the Egyptians ; the new alchtmistic 

 precepts' of the pseudo-Democritns and the Sophist Synesius ; 

 or even from Chinese sources, through the agency of the 

 Moguls. According to the recent and very careful investiga- 

 tions of a celebrated Oriental scholar, M. Reinaud, the inven- 

 tion of gunpowder,* and its application to the discharge of 

 hollow projectiles, must not he ascribed to the Arabs. Has- 

 san Al-Rammah, who WTote between 1285 and 1295, was not 

 acquainted with this application ; while, even in the twelfth 

 century, and, therefore, nearly two hundred years before Ber- 

 thold Schwarz, a species of gunpowder was used to blast the 

 rock in the Rammelsberg, in the Harz Mountains. The in- 

 vention of an air thermometer is also ascribed to Avicenna 

 from a notice by Sanctorius, but this notice is very obscure, 

 and six centuries passed before Galileo, Cornelius Drebbel, and 

 the Academia del Cimento, by the establishment of an exact 

 measurer of heat, created an important means for penetrating 

 into a world of unknow'n phenomena, and comprehending the 

 cosmical connection of effects in the atmosphere, the super- 

 imposed strata of the ocean, and the interior of the earth, thus 

 revealing phenomena whose regularity and periodicity excite 

 our astonishment. Anions: the advances which science owes 

 to the Arabs, it will be sufficient to mention Alhazen's work 

 on Refraction, partly borrow^ed, perhaps, from Ptolemy's Op- 

 tics, and the knowledge and first application of the pendulum 

 as a means of measuring time, due to the great astronomer 

 Ebn-Junis f 



process), and forms, according to Wilson, the seventh division of the 

 dynr-Veda. the " science of Hfe, or of the prolongation of life." (Royle, 

 Hindoo Medicine, p. 39-48.) The Indians have been acquainted from 

 the earliest times (Royle, p. 131) with the application of mordants in 

 calico or cotton printing, an Egyptian art, which is most clearly de- 

 scribed in riiny, lib. xxxv., cap. 11, No. 150. The word " chemistri/^ 

 indicates literally " Egyptian art," the art of the black land ; for Plu- 

 tarch (^De hide et Osir., cap. 33) knew that the Egyptians called their 

 country Xyjiiia, from the black earth. The inscription on the Rosetta 

 stone has Chmi. I find this wo»J, as applied to the analytic art, first in 

 the decrees of Diocletian against " the old writings of the Egyptians 

 which treat of the ^ xV/^^(^^ of gold and silver" (TVEpt ;^7/i£/af dpyvpov Kol 

 Xpvaov). Compare my Examen Crit. de V Hist, de la Geographic et de 

 V Astronomie Nautiqne, t. ii., p. 314. 



* Reinaud et Fave, Du Feu Gregcois,des Feux de Guerre et des Ori- 

 gincs de la Poudre a Canon, t. i., 1845, p. 89, 97, 201, and 211 ; Picbert 

 Traile d'Ariillerie, 183C, p. 25 ; Beckmann, Technologic, s. 342. 



t Laplace, Precis d-e VHist. de V Astronomie, 1821, p. 60; and Am. 

 Bcdillot, Mimoire snr les Instrumens Astr. des Arabes, 1?41, p. 44. 

 Thomas Young (Leclttref. on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanica. 



