cxxx
543. Of course, the Barmak family had been converted, but their contemporaries never thought much of their profession of Islam, nor regarded it as genuine. Induced probably by family traditions, they sent scholars to India, there to study medicine and pharmacology. Besides, they engaged Hindu scholars to come to Bagdad, made them the chief physicians of their hospitals, and ordered them to translate from Sanskrit into Arabic books on medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, philosophy, astrology and other subjects. Still in later centuries Muslim scholars sometimes travelled for the same purposes as the emissaries of the Barmak, e.g. Almuwaffak, not long before Albérūnī's time ("Codex Vindobonensis, sive medici Abu Mansur liber fundamentorum pharmacologiæ, ed. Seligmann, Vienna, 1859, pp. 6, 10, and 15, 9."
We shall finish with another appropriate extract from Prof. Macdonell's recent work[1]:—
So also Prof. Macdonell."In Science, too, the debt of Europe to India has been considerable. There is in the first place, the great fact that the Indians invented the numerical figures
- ↑ "Hist. Sans. Lit." p. 424.
