40 SCIENCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. PT. n. 



part of Spain, and even of the south of France as far as the 

 river Aucle, in Languedoc, and then when Charles Martel, 

 mayor of the Franks, conquered them at Tours in 732, and 

 stopped them from going any farther, they settled down and 

 began to give their attention to science and learning. 



The Arabs, however, had not only made conquests in 

 the west, they had also become masters in Asia, where two 

 classes of people taught them the science of the Greeks. 

 These were the Nestorians and the Jews. The followers 

 of Nestorius, the banished Patriarch of Constantinople, had 

 migrated early in the fifth century into Asia, and founded 

 there the large sect of Nestorians among the people of Assyria 

 and Persia. Under the Mahommedan Kaliphs these Nes- 

 torians translated many Greek works of science into Syriac 

 and Arabic, and, together with those Jews who took refuge 

 in Syria and Mesopotamia after the fall of Jerusalem, they 

 founded several medical schools. The Arabian schools of 

 Bagdad, Cairo, Salerno in the south of Italy, and Cordova 

 in Spain, soon became famous all over the world. The 

 Arabs were not able to practise anatomy, because the 

 Koran, that is the Mahommedan Bible, taught that it 

 was not right to dissect the human body, so they turned 

 their attention chiefly to medicine, trying to discover what 

 substances they could extract from plants and minerals, at 

 first to serve as medicines, but soon for very different uses. 



Arabian Alchemists. They found something in the 

 old Greek writings about the way to melt stones or minerals, 

 so as to get out of them iron, mercury, and other metals ; 

 and also how to extract many beautiful colours out of rocks 

 and earths. But the chief thing which interested them in 

 the books of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, was the 

 attempts these nations had made to turn other metals into 

 gold, a discovery which tradition said had been made by 



