PROGRESS OF THE ARTS. 359 



there never was a period of the earth's history, and 

 least of all a period of commerce and manufactures, 

 luxury and art, medicine and engineering, in which 

 were not going on innumerable processes, which 

 may be termed experiments; and, in addition to 

 these, the Arabians adopted the pursuit of alchemy, 

 and the love of exotic plants and animals. But so 

 far from their being, as has been maintained 3 , a 

 people whose " experimental intellect " fitted them 

 to form sciences which the " abstract intellect " of 

 the Greeks failed in producing, it rather appears, 

 that several of the sciences which the Greeks had 

 founded, were never even comprehended by the 

 Arabians. I do not know any evidence that these 

 pupils ever attained to understand the real prin- 

 ciples of mechanics, hydrostatics, and harmonics, 

 which their masters had established. At any rate, 

 when these sciences again came progressive, Europe 

 had to start where Europe had stopped. There 

 is no Arabian name which any one has thought of 

 interposing between Archimedes the ancient, and 

 Stevinus and Galileo the moderns. 



4. Roger Bacon. There is one writer of the 

 middle ages, on whom much stress has been laid, 

 and who was certainly a most remarkable person. 

 Roger Bacon's works are not only so far beyond his 

 age in the knowledge which they contain, but so 

 different from the temper of the times, in his asser- 

 tion of the supremacy of experiment, and in his 



3 Mahometanism Unveiled, ii. 271- 



