34 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



by which the remains of ancient learning have 

 reached the modern world. The translator's name 

 is given as Johannes filius Bitricii, but this can 

 hardly have been the well-known Ibn-el-Bitriq, 

 the freedman of Mamoun. To this latter author 

 indeed, the Fihrist, composed in 987, ascribes the 

 Arabic version of Aristotle's De Ccelo et Mundoy 

 and of Plato's Timaeus,^ so that his literary 

 faculty would seem to accord very well with 

 the task of translating the Sirr-el-asrar. But 

 Foerster has observed ^ that we find no trace of 

 this book in Arabian literature before the eleventh 

 century. Now the famous Ibn-el-Bitriq lived in the 

 ninth, as appears from several considerations. His 

 works were revised by Honain ibn Ishaq (873), 

 and, if we believe in the authenticity of the El 

 Haivi, where he is mentioned by name, then he 

 must have belonged to an age at least as early 

 as that of Rases who wrote it. In these perplexing 

 circumstances, Foerster gives up the attempt to 

 determine who may have been the translator of 

 the Sirr-el-asrar, contenting himself with the con- 

 jecture that some unknown scholar had assumed 

 the name of El Bitriq to give importance to the 

 production of his pen. We may be excused, 

 however, if we direct attention to two manuscripts 

 of the British Museum^ which do not seem to 

 have been noticed by those who have devoted 

 attention to this obscure subject. One of these, 

 which is written in a hand of the thirteenth 

 century, informs us that the man who transcribed 



i See on this whole subject the excellent remarks of Foerster in liis 

 treatise De Aristotelis quae fenmtur Secretis Secretorum, Kiliae, 1888, 

 pp. 22-25. 



2 Wright's Cat. of the Syriac MSS., Nos. 250 and 366. 



