74 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



algebra, chemistry, and medicine was carried into 

 Western Europe. By the latter half of the tenth 

 century, one hundred and fifty years after the trans- 

 lation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become 

 no mean rival of Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were 

 founded ; colleges to which the Girton girls of the 

 period could repair to learn mathematics and history 

 were set up by lady principals ; manufactures and 

 agriculture were encouraged ; and lovely and stately 

 palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova, 

 Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the 

 far-famed Alhamra or Red Fortress still overlooks. 

 Seven hundred years before there was a public lamp 

 in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy 

 roadways bordered by windowless dwellings, Cordova 

 had miles of well-lighted, well-paved streets ; and the 

 constant use of the bath by the * infidel ' contrasted 

 with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride 

 of flesh-mortifying devotees and the outward and 

 odorous signs of their religion. The pages of our 

 dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and 

 chemical terms ; in the names of the principal 

 ' fixed ' stars ; and in the words * admiral ' and 

 ' chemise ' ; the influence of the ' Arab ' in science, 

 war, and dress. 



It forms no part of our story to tell how feuds 

 between rival dynasties and rival sects of Islam, 

 becoming more acute as time went on, enabled 

 Christianity to recover lost ground, and, in the cap- 

 ture of Granada in 1492, to put an end to Moorish 

 rule in Spain. Before that event, a knowledge of 

 Greek philosophy had been diffused through Christen- 

 dom by the translation of the works of Avicenna, 



