THE RENAISSANCE OP SCIENCE. 7 



intimately influenced the west. The chivalry of Europe is, in great 

 measure, a product of the Saracen chivalry which entered Europe in 

 two streams flowing through Constantinople and through Spain. The 

 poetry of the Troubadours and the romances of the feudal period are 

 directly derived from the Arabs. Even the rhythms of the Troubadours 

 are copied from Arab models, and the three-stringed lyre of the Jong- 

 leur is from an Arab original. It is from the east that the very idea 

 of rhymed poetry is derived. To speak only of Persia : Alexander the 

 Great destroyed at Persepolis buildings more magnificent than any 

 others ever seen on the round world, not excepting the monuments of 

 Athens; the looms of Persia made imperial Constantinople splendid; 

 chemistry is a Persian word, and the Arabs borrowed their knowledge 

 of the art from Iran; all the drugs of Hippocrates have Persian 

 names; the Persians transmitted the immortal fables and apologues 

 of India to the Arabs, and through them to the west; the works of 

 the Persian sage Avicenna were text-books in the universities of Paris 

 and Montpellier as late as the time of Louis the Fourteenth; our 

 little children are bred up on the tales of the Arabian Nights, a great 

 part of which are of Persian origin; in a thousand unacknowledged 

 ways the west has been taught by the east. When England was a 

 wilderness, inhabited by savages, Persia was polite, cultivated, ingeni- 

 ous, learned and illustrious. Whether we know it or not, we have 

 learned much from them, though the debt is all but ignored except in 

 the writings of scholars. 



Moslems took the alien culture of the Greeks much as the Japanese 

 of our own time have taken the culture of Europe. I remember well 

 handing an astrolabe made in England in the seventeenth century, for 

 one of the ships of the Alaskan fleet of Russia, to an accomplished 

 officer of the Japanese navy. He was perfectly familiar with modern 

 navigation and with the sextant, but this classic instrument was a 

 complete puzzle to his mind. The contemporaries of his father had 

 sailed their little boats by timid coasting from headland to headland 

 of the Inland Sea; but no one of them had ever seen a sextant or a 

 quadrant. Like the Arabs of long ago they made one leap from com- 

 plete ignorance of such matters to the possession of the most refined 

 apparatus, while English navigators, our ancestors, slowly mastered 

 the use of the backstaff, the cross-staff, the astrolabe, the quadrant, the 

 sextant, during a long succession of centuries. 



Such considerations as these partly account for the fact that, in spite 

 of their wonderful acumen, the Arabs added little or nothing to the 

 theory of scientific astronomy. Moreover, their religion allowed them 

 but scant liberty. They were confined within the narrow limits of 

 Koranic permissions and prohibitions. It was forbidden to make an 

 image of any living thing either by painting or sculpture. Poetry was 



