CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 73 



sense: faunistics and zoogeography. Such authors are mentioned as early as 

 the ninth and tenth centuries, but their writings have not been preserved. 

 On the other hand, there is still extant an account of the animals of Egypt, 

 written by Abdallatif (1162.-1131), which is manifestly based not only upon 

 ancient authors, but also upon personal investigation. Inter alia, he gives 

 a detailed description of the hippopotamus and the crocodile and also an 

 account of the method customary in Egypt of hatching hen's eggs by arti- 

 ficial heat. A fairly large work entitled Animal Life by Muhammed el Damiri, 

 written at the end of the fourteenth century, has come down to us. He has 

 described a great number of animal species — one statement declares it to 

 be nearly nine hundred — partly based on his own observations, but partly 

 also on pure imagination. Arabic literature possesses one author comparable 

 with Pliny in the person of Sakarja ben Muhammed, called el Kasvini after 

 his own district of Kasvin in northern Persia. He lived in the thirteenth 

 century and thus had at his disposal, besides Aristotle and Hippocrates, 

 whom he freely quotes, a number of Arabian predecessors, of whose works he 

 made extensive use. His important collective work. The Wonders of Nature, is 

 based on Aristotle's natural philosophy of evolution from the lower to the 

 higher; the capacity to feel and move differentiates the plants from the ani- 

 mals. His theory of fossilized animals is curious; he believes that they have 

 been petrified by steam arising out of the ground on which they stood. For 

 the rest, he describes a number of tropical animals which were unknown to 

 ancient authors, for instance the orang-utan, which he pictures as having 

 the human characteristics which the inhabitants of his native place ascribe 

 to it, and, further, the flying dog, the dugong, and others. 



On the whole, it is through their having promoted the knowledge of 

 and the cultural influences between the East, even its most distant parts, and 

 the West, that the Arabs have become best known among the peoples of the 

 West; rather than by the really more profound cultural service they performed 

 in having preserved and developed the remains of ancient culture at a period 

 when the West was incapacitated from preserving the inheritance which 

 nevertheless most directly devolved upon its peoples. Through the interme- 

 diary of the Arabian philosophers the few learned scholars of the West in the 

 early Middle Ages acquired a knowledge of the products of classical culture; 

 Aristotle, for instance, was long read at the mediasval universities in Latin 

 versions of Arabic translations from the original writings, and the Arabic 

 commentators, Avicenna, Averroes, and others, were the first to act as guides 

 to an understanding of the treatises on nature and to help Europeans to pene- 

 trate that world of phenomena whose existence they had entirely forgotten. 

 Thanks to Arabian science, the so-called dark centuries of the Middle Ages 

 were at any rate culturally fruitful, and when oriental science, after flourish- 

 ing for a brief period, died out, the people of the West had already laid the 

 foundations of an entirely new cultural development. 



