72 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



know that there was a previous link in the chain of 

 intellectual succession. This was supplied by the 

 care and industry of the Syrian subjects of the early 

 Caliphs, nor did their learned men play a less im- 

 portant part in the history of chemistry than in 

 that of the other sciences. Sergius of Ilesama, a 

 scholar of the fifth century, was, it is said, the first 

 Syrian who attempted to translate the Greek 

 chemists, several of whom mention him by name. 

 The chief development of this work belongs, how- 

 ever, to the ninth and tenth centuries, and its glory 

 must ever remain with the great school of Bagdad. 

 Chemical treatises composed by Democritus and 

 Zosimus l were there and then rendered into Syriac, 

 as may be seen by the manuscripts still preserved 

 in the British Museum and at Cambridge. 



It was not long before the Arabs themselves 

 began to feel powerfully the intellectual impulse 

 thus communicated to them in the heart of a 

 country which they had made their own. Khaled 

 ben Yezid ibn Moauia, who died in the year 708, is 

 said by their historians to have been the first of that 

 nation who devoted his attention to chemistry. In 

 his case the filiation of doctrine would seem very 

 plain, as he was the pupil of a Syrian monk named 

 Mariannos. Djabar, the Geber of Western writers, 

 followed in the same line of study, and from the 

 ninth century there was a regular school of Arabian 

 chemists whose labours may be studied in the 

 manuscript collections of Paris and Ley den. 



In the eleventh century appeared a curious phe- 

 nomenon, in the shape of a dispute among the 

 Arabians of that day regarding the truth of the 



1 Of Pannopolis, a chemist of the fourth century. 



