Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/420

408 life. Owing to the misrule of his successor in the regency of Morocco, the discontented people earnestly petitioned the ruler of the Faithful to restore their former governor, whose mildness and wisdom had secured to them so high a degree of prosperity and so many blessings. After much deliberation Averroës was restored to freedom, reinstated in his positions of honor, where his moral virtues, his amiability, his justice, and his humanity, were exercised to the advantage of his fellow-beings. He secured the love, the applause, the admiration, and gratitude of the people over whom he ruled, and we are told that happiness gilded the evening of his days, his sun sank gently beneath an unclouded horizon, and his memory was a radiant halo, not unlike the roseate twilight that sometimes lingers along the western sky, the charming influence of which can only be felt and contemplated with emotions of grateful delight. And thus it was that Averroës closed his eventful life in the year of grace 1198, being but about a twelve-month previous to the death of his patron Almansur, with whom the political power of the Moslems terminated, as did the study of the liberal sciences with the death of Averroës.

He was evidently a man of dignity, rectitude, and nobility; a wise and humane judge; a devoted student; a profound scholar; and, though surrounded by the luxuries of a royal court, yet simple, temperate, almost rigidly abstemious in his mode of life.

As a medical writer Averroës was the author of two works which are still extant; one being the "Koullyath," or "Kulliyyat," which is better known as the "Colliget" or "Summary"; the other is a commentary on the medical poem or cantica of Avicenna. The "Colliget," which is his principal work, was dedicated to Abdelech, the Miramamolin of Morocco, and contains a digest of the whole science of medicine, being divided into seven books. It contains but little that is original, though we find him speaking of his own experiences. He is said to be the first to state that small-pox occurs in the human constitution but once in a lifetime. His anatomy is copied entirely from Galen. His commentary on the cantica of Avicenna was considered to be the best introduction to medicine that had ever appeared.

Some time ago I picked up a curious little duodecimo entitled "Averroeana," being a transcript of several letters from "Averroës, an Arabian philosopher at Corduba, in Spain, to Metrodorus, a young Grecian nobleman, student at Athens," in the years 1149 and 1150. Also "several letters from Pythagoras to the King of India," etc., etc." The whole containing matters highly philosophical, physiological, Pythagorical, and medicinal. The work having been long concealed, is now put into English for the benefit of mankind, and the rectification of learned mistakes." London, 1695.

P. Grinau tells us, in his prefatory letter, that his friend Petit, who had for many years resided in Andalusia, gave him the book, which he says was written by Averroës's own hand, and that it had