124 LITERATURE OF THE ARABS. 



which they successively occupied. In the colleges 

 of Cordova, Seville, and Toledo, the scholars of 

 Italy, France, Germany, and England, drank from 

 the copious fountain of Arabian literature. Among 

 the number of their distinguished students were 

 Adelard, a monk of Bath, in the eleventh century, 

 Morley, a native of Norfolk, and our countryman, 

 the celebrated Michael Scott, who is only known in 

 Scotland by his reputation as a wizard. 



By the command of Charlemagne, the principal 

 Arabic books were translated into Latin, for the use 

 of the people in the various provinces of his empire. 

 For several centuries medicine found a secure retreat 

 at Salerno and Montpellier, whither students nocked 

 from all quarters of Europe, and where the Chris- 

 tians became acquainted with the works of Galen 

 and Hippocrates. Even the Greeks and Jews did 

 not disdain to learn the healing art from the Sara- 

 cens, many of whom were induced, by the liberal- 

 ity of Alphonso X., to settle at Toledo. The Ara- 

 bian arithmetic, introduced by Gerbert, was im- 

 proved by Leonardo, a merchant of Pisa, who learned 

 the art during his residence at Algiers, about the 

 commencement of the thirteenth century; and to 

 that commercial republic may be attributed the dis- 

 tinction of being the first among the Christian states 

 of the West which employed this system of notation. 

 In short, without exaggerating the labours of the 

 Arabs, it may be said that we are indebted to them, 

 not only for the revival of the exact and physical 

 sciences, but for most of those useful arts and inven- 

 tions that have wrought so total a change and given 

 so beneficial an impulse to the literature and civili- 

 sation of Europe. 



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