ARABIAN SCIENCE
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another language — the Arabic. The Arabian Mussulmans, when they possessed themselves of the old Greek settlements in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, assimilated the learning and science of the Greeks with extraordinary intellectual ardour and perseverance. With the help of the Armenians and Syrian Christians, among whom the traditions of Greek science still survived, the chief Greek scientific writers, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, with many more, were translated into Arabic, and thus were laid the foundations of the brilliant civilization and literature of the Arabs to which Europe afterwards owed so much. It had been said in old times that conquered Greece took her Roman conquerors captive, and now for the second time the Greek genius asserted itself and became supreme over the warlike races whose arms it was unable to resist. The Arabian scientific literature was thus founded mainly on the Greek. It was of enormous extent; what now survives is but a fragment. The philosophy and physics of Aristotle, the geometry of Euclid, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates, were all there, along with the writings of Arabic authors, Avicenna, Rases, Serapion, and many a lesser name, whose works were mainly founded on those of the Greeks, but with certain important additions. In mathematics, as is well known, the Arabs surpassed their teachers ; in medicine, especially in pharmacy and in the recognition of new diseases, they added much that was new ; though in anatomy they went backward rather than forward.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, through causes which need not now be traced, this great treasury of science became available for the European world by the translation of the Arabic literature into Latin. The first of the school of translators who performed this great service to medical science, Constantine, called the African, says expressly, in the preface to one of his versions of Galen from the Arabic, that he undertook it because no work of Galen’s existed in the Latin language. The task was continued more
