DE. TH. NEUMANN. 145 



much outside of our sphere that ignorance concerning 

 it is not only pardonable but a matter of course. It is the 

 Arabian language. That tongue is, and has been since 

 the seventh century, when the Arabians began to develop 

 their own peculiar ways of culture and civilization, one 

 of the, or rather the universal tongue of the Orient. 

 Arabian science, especially mathematics, poetry and 

 historiography, and above all, their religion, Moham- 

 medanism, showed forth such an innate power that 

 their language also soon became universal, and this 

 position it maintained and confirmed during the middle 

 ages. It penetrated as far as Persia and India, along 

 the south coast of the Mediterranean into North Africa 

 until it reached Spain, and on the northern coast of the 

 same water over Syria to the Balkan Peninsula. Arabian 

 influence was felt even in Rome, and for several centuries 

 the learned men of the Orient and such as wanted to 

 study the deepest problems of Philosophy, Geometry, 

 Algebra, Astronomy, Anatomy, Hygiene, went to the seats 

 of Arabian universities where the stream of knowledge 

 issued forth in pure, strong, unadulterated, uninterrupt- 

 ed flow. To-day Arabian is one of the most im- 

 portant universal languages, Just as Islam is one of 

 the great religions of the world, one supported by the 

 other, and supporting it in its turn just as Christianity 

 and Greek belonged to each other. The Koran is writ- 

 ten in Arabian, and other documents of Arabian litera- 

 ture have been of the greatest significance for the study 

 of mankind and universal literature. It reached its 

 highest development after Mohammed, and those scholars 

 of our days who succeed in mastering that language, can- 

 not tell us in words enthusiastic enough what splendor,' 

 what delicacy, what tenderness, what strength is 

 put down in all those love songs, those heroic melo- 

 dies, and in those hymns which sing of spring and youth. 

 Besides these universal languages, spoken by entire 



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