SEQUEL TO THE EPOCH OF HIPPARCHUS. 243 



cases in which it occurs selected and grouped by 

 an inductive effort of the mind. The advance is 

 not great; for Aboul Wefa appears only to have 

 detected the existence, and not to have fixed the 

 law or the exact quantity of the inequality ; but 

 still it places the scientific capacity of the Arabs 

 in a more favourable point of view than any cir- 

 cumstance with which we were previously ac- 

 quainted. 



But this discovery of Aboul Wefa appears to 

 have excited no notice among his contemporaries 

 and followers ; at least it had been long quite for- 

 gotten when Tycho Brahe rediscovered the same 

 lunar inequality. We can hardly help looking upon 

 this circumstance as an evidence of a servility 

 of intellect belonging to the Arabian period. The 

 learned Arabians were so little in the habit of 

 considering science as progressive, and looking with 

 pride and confidence at examples of its progress, 

 that they had not the courage to believe in a 

 discovery which they themselves had made, and 

 were dragged back by the chain of authority, even 

 when they had advanced beyond their Greek mas- 

 ters. 



As the Arabians took the whole of their theory 

 (with such slight exceptions as we have been 

 noticing) from the Greeks, they took from them 

 also the mathematical processes by which the con- 

 sequences of the theory were obtained. Arithmetic 

 and Trigonometry, two main branches of these 



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