104 LITERATURE OF THE ARABS. 



literature, science, and the arts were carried, and 

 continued to flourish from the ninth to the four- 

 teenth century of our era, in those vast countries 

 which had submitted to the yoke of Islam. The 

 literary apparatus of the Saracens was splendid, and 

 their progress merits all the eulogy that has been 

 bestowed on it. Certain prejudices, however, de- 

 prived them of part of the benefits which they might 

 have reaped from a familiar intercourse with classic 

 authors ; and, as has been remarked, with all their 

 enthusiasm for European learning, there is no ex- 

 ample of a poet, an orator, or even an historian of 

 Greece and Rome being translated into their lan- 

 guage.* 



Though the Saracens cannot claim to rank high 

 as inventors and discoverers, they must be acknow- 

 ledged as the restorers of letters and the great deposit 

 taries of science. Many useful treatises, now lost 

 in the original, were preserved in their language. 

 Besides some of the commentaries of Galen and 

 Hippocrates, we owe to this cause the completion 

 of the mathematical works of Apollonius Pergaeus ; 

 part of which, in Arabic, was discovered about the 

 middle of the seventeenth century, in the Medicean 

 Library, and part among the Bodleian Collection, 

 of which a Latin version was given by the Savilian 

 professors, Bernard and Halley. It is unquestion- 

 able that a great number of the inventions which 

 at the present day add to the comforts of life, and 

 without which literature and the arts could never 

 have flourished, are due to the Arabs. They taught 

 us the use of the pendulum in the measurement of 

 time ; and also of the telegraph, though not with all 

 the speed and effect of modern improvement. The 

 pianufacture of silk and cotton Avas brought by them 



* We must make one exception. Erpenius states, that in the 

 great library at Fez, which contained 32,000 volumes, there was 

 preserved an entire copy of Livy in Arabic— Lomitr, de Biblioth. 



