208 COSMOS. 



in cities, while in the great Arabian peninsula the countrj 

 people still hold communion with the inhabitants of the towns, 

 whom they regard as of the same origin as themselves.* In 

 the Kirghis steppe, a portion of the plain inhabited by the 

 ancient Scythians (the Scoloti and Sacse), and which exceeds 

 in extent the area of Germany, there has never been a city 

 for thousands of years, and yet, at the time of my journey in 

 Siberia, the number of the tents (Yurti or Kibitkes) occupied 

 by the three nomadic hordes exceeded 400,000, which would 

 give a population of 2, 000, 000. t It is hardly necessary to 

 enter more circumstantially into the consideration of the effect 

 produced on mental culture by such great contrasts in the 

 greater or less isolation of a nomadic life, even where equaJ 

 mental qualifications are presupposed. 



In the more highly-gifted race of the Arabs, natural adapt 

 ability for mental cultivation, the geographical relations we 

 have already indicated, and the ancient commercial intercourse 

 of the littoral districts with the highly-civilized neighboring 

 states, all combine to explain how the irruption into Syria and 

 Persia, and the subsequent possession of Egypt, were so speed- 

 ily able to awaken in the conquerors a love for science and a 

 tendency to the pursuit of independent observation. It was 

 ordained in the wonderful decrees by which the course of 

 events is regulated, that the Christian sects of Nestorians, 

 which exercised a very marked influence on the geographical 

 diffusion of knowledge, should prove of use to the Arabs even 

 before they advanced to the erudite and contentious city of 

 Alexandria, and that, protected by the armed followers of the 

 creed of Islam, these Nestorian doctrines of Christianity were 

 enabled to penetrate far into Eastern Asia. The Arabs were 

 first made acquainted with Greek literature through the Syr- 

 ians, a kindred Semitic race, who had themselves acquired a 

 knowledge of it only about a hundred and fifty years earlier 

 through the heretical Nestorians. $ Physicians, who had been 

 educated in the scholastic establishments of the Greeks, and 

 in the celebrated school of medicine founded by the Nestorian 

 Christians at Edessa in Mesopotamia, were settled at Mecca 

 as early as Mohammed's time, and there lived on a footing of 

 friendly intercourse with the Prophet and Abu-Bekr. 



* Gibbon, Hist, of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 

 ix., chap. 50, p. 200 (Leips., 1829). 



t Humboldt, Asie Centr., t. ii., p. 128. 



$ Jourdain, Recherches Critiques svr I' Age des Traductions d'Aristote, 

 1819, p. 81 and 87. 



