578 



COSMOS. 



the country people still hold communion with the inhabitants 

 of the towns, whom they regard as of the same origin as them- 

 selves.* In the Kirghis steppe, a portion of the plain, inha- 

 bited by the ancient Scythians, (the Scoloti and Saca3,) 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.f 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 equal mental qualifications are 

 presupposed. 



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

 tibility for mental cultivation, the geographical relations we 

 have already indicated, and the ancient commercial inter- 

 course of the littoral districts with the highly civilized neigh- 

 bouring states, all combine to explain how the irruption into 

 Syria and Persia, and the subsequent possession of Egypt, 

 were so speedily able to awaken in the conquerors a love for 

 science, and a tendency to the pursuit of independent obser- 

 vation. 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 con- 

 tentious 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 Syrians, a kindred Semitic race, who had them- 

 selves acquired a knowledge of it only about a hundred and 

 fifty years earlier through the heretical Nestorians.ij: Physi- 

 cians, who had been educated in the scholastic establishments 

 of the Greeks, and in the celebrated school of medicine founded 



* 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. 



t Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur I' Age des Traductions d'Aristote t 

 1819, pp. 81 and 87. 



