72 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



pause, the Saracens (Ar. sharkiin, orientals) resumed 

 their conquering march. They captured and burnt 

 Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and 

 then crossed over to Spain. In ' the fair and fertile 

 isle of Andalusia ' the Gothic king Roderick was 

 aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his 

 army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the 

 infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in 

 six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the 

 north and north-western portions excepted, for the 

 hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their inde- 

 pendence against the Arabs, as they had maintained 

 it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the 

 walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff 

 from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested 

 their advance in Western Europe ; as, in a more 

 momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo 

 III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of 

 Mohammedan conquest was first checked. 



Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their 

 destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, in- 

 cluded the burning of the remnants of the vast 

 Alexandrian library. * A revealed dogma is always 

 opposed to the free research that may contradict it/ 

 and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than 

 Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the 

 renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental 

 as the story of it is interesting. 



Under the Sassanian kings, Persia had become an 

 active centre of intellectual life, reaching the climax 

 of its Augustan age in the reign of Chosroes. 

 Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at 

 his court, and translations of the writings of the 



