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54 HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



dorus, A.D. 395, and the troubles occasioned by the invasions of the 

 Goths and other barbarous tribes, may account for that final neglect 

 of Greek literature at Rome which caused the records of science and 

 philosophy, written as they were in the Greek language, to remain for 

 ages a dead letter to the nations of the West. Centuries elapsed before 

 the writings of Aristotle and Ptolemy were again made accessible to 

 the European student by Latin translations not from the Greek ori- 

 ginals, but from versions of those prepared and preserved by an Eastern 

 race, with whose annals our history now becomes connected, and who 

 cultivated science and fostered learning at a period when every Euro- 

 pean nation was enveloped in the deepest intellectual darkness. 



Perhaps no page in history is more strange than that which de- 

 scribes the rise and progress of the Mahometan empire ; but the ac- 

 counts must be sought in the general history of the world, where the 

 reader will find a record of the wonderful series of events which gave 

 the Arabs of the desert an empire more extensive than that of the 

 Caesars. There the reader may learn how these -people, bursting from 

 the sterile plains of their native peninsula, spread themselves with the 

 force and rapidity of a deluge over many beautiful and fertile regions, 

 whose possessors were too enervated by luxury, too depressed by 

 tyranny, or too cowed by superstition to oppose an effective resistance. 

 In the East the Mahometan conquests embraced Syria, Persia, and 

 Asia Minor; along the north of Africa they stretched from Egypt 

 to Morocco ; and in Spain extended from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees. 



The Koran, when first promulgated by Mahomet, was universally 

 accepted by his followers as containing everything necessary or useful 

 for man to know. His people were at first acquainted with no other 

 book, and indeed considered all other learning superfluous. When 

 the city of Alexandria was taken by the Saracens (A.D. 642), their 

 general sent to inquire of the Khalif Omar what should be done with 

 the library. The reply was that the library was to be destroyed, 

 " for the books which contain what is already in the Koran are un- 

 necessary, those that contradict it are pernicious, and those that treat 

 of other matters are useless." Accordingly the remnant of the great 

 library of the Ptolemies, which, after sustaining for nine centuries 

 damages from fire, war, plunder, and theological bigotry, was still a 

 magnificent collection, was committed to the flames, or, as some say, 

 furnished fuel for six months to the public baths of Alexandria. 



Yet the Arabians, although they were originally amongst the most 

 barbarous of Asiatic races, had a true aptitude for science, philosophy, 

 and literature, and their intellectual genius was only awaiting the 

 proper conditions for its development. For no sooner had the Saracen 

 empire been extended and the Mahometan religion established by a 

 series of conquests of unprecedented rapidity, than the hitherto un- 

 compromising fanaticism of the followers of the Prophet subsided; and 

 so marvellous a change came over the opinions of their leaders, that 



