Progress of Science; Its Origin, Course, Promoters, and Results (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. PROGRESS AMONG THE ARABS. (From the IXth to the XVth Century'.) The next group of scientific facts belongs to the Arabian period. Science had migrated to Persia after 415 A.D., when Bishop Cyril caused the destruction of the Alexandrian Museum. The Greek men of science, Nestorian and Jewish, escaped death at the hands of the fanatical Christians by flight, and carried away with them the sciences of which they were the teachers. Protected by the Persian kings, science survived the Alexandria catastrophe, and the Persians became its custodians for two centuries?until they were overcome by the Moslem conquerors, the Arabs (641). The Arabs, their cycle of conquest over, assimilated the Greek learning flourishing in Persia, and in their turn became the representatives, guardians, and teachers of ancient knowledge. Civilisation, or what was of great value in the Greek world, was not dead; it had gyrated; and the Arabs, having received science from the ancients, gave to every branch of it an accuracy and enlargement at once unforeseen and substantial. The following sketch will enable us to see that their triumphs in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine were both glorious and durable. In order, however, fully to understand the part which the Arabs have played in the progress of mankind, it is necessary to see what sort of civilisation theirs was?and this necessitates a short description. A similar description was notneeded in the case of the Greeks, because we all know by what our training, books, museums bring every day to our minds, that our civilisation is partly Greek. The monuments of art, literature, and philosophy which we possess make the Greek world familiar to us. It is not so with regard to the Arabs. Very few people are aware of ...