THE ARABS. 209 



The school of Edessa, a prototype of the Benedictine schools 

 of Monte Cassino and Salerno, gave the first impulse to a sci- 

 entific investigation of remedial agents yielded from the min- 

 eral and vegetable kingdoms. When these establishments 

 were dissolved by Christian fanaticism, under Zeno the Isau- 

 rian, the Nestorians were scattered over Persia, where they 

 soon attained to political importance, and founded at Dschon- 

 disapur, in Khusistan, a medical school, which was afterward 

 much frequented. They succeeded, toward the middle of the 

 seventh century, in extending their knowledge and their doc- 

 trines as far as China, under the Thang dynasty, 572 years 

 after Buddhism had penetrated thither from India. 



The seeds of Western civilization, which had been scatter- 

 ed over Persia by learned monks and by the philosophers of 

 the last Platonic school at Athens, persecuted by Justinian, 

 had exercised a beneficial influence on the Arabs during their 

 first Asiatic campaigns. However faint the sparks of knowl- 

 edge difiiised by the Nestorian priesthood might have been, 

 their peculiar tendency to the investigation of medical phar- 

 macy could not fail to influence a race which had so lonc^ 

 lived in the enjoyment of a free communion with nature, and 

 which preserved a more vivid feeling for every kind of natural 

 investigation than the Greek and Italian inhabitants of cities. 

 The cosmical importance attached to the age of the Arabs 

 depends in a great measure on the national characteristics 

 which we are here considering. The Arabs, I would again re- 

 mark, are to be regarded as the actual founders of physical sci- 

 ence, considered in the sense which we now apply to the words. 



It is undoubtedly extremely difiicult to associate any abso- 

 lute beginning with any definite epoch of time in the history 

 of the mental world and of the intimately-connected elements 

 of thought. Individual luminous points of knowledge, and 

 the processes by which knowledge was gradually attained, 

 may be traced scattered through very early periods of time. 

 How great is the difference that separates Dioscorides, who 

 distilled mercury from cinnabar, from the Arabian chemist 

 Dscheber ; how widely is Ptolemy, as an optician, removed 

 from Alhazen ; but we must, nevertheless, date the founda- 

 tion of the physical sciences, and even of natural science, from 

 the point where new paths were first trodden by many difi^er- 

 ent investigators, although with unequal success. To the mere 

 contemplation of nature, to the observation of the phenomena 

 accidentally presented to the eye in the terrestrial and celes- 

 tial regions of space, succeeds investigation into the actual, an 



