Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/11

Rh intimately influenced the west. The chivalry of Europe is, in great measure, a product of the Saracen chivalry which entered Europe in two streams flowing through Constantinople and through Spain. The poetry of the Troubadours and the romances of the feudal period are directly derived from the Arabs. Even the rhythms of the Troubadours are copied from Arab models, and the three-stringed lyre of the Jongleur is from an Arab original. It is from the east that the very idea of rhymed poetry is derived. To speak only of Persia: Alexander the Great destroyed at Persepolis buildings more magnificent than any others ever seen on the round world, not excepting the monuments of Athens; the looms of Persia made imperial Constantinople splendid; chemistry is a Persian word, and the Arabs borrowed their knowledge of the art from Iran; all the drugs of Hippocrates have Persian names; the Persians transmitted the immortal fables and apologues of India to the Arabs, and through them to the west; the works of the Persian sage Avicenna were text-books in the universities of Paris and Montpellier as late as the time of Louis the Fourteenth; our little children are bred up on the tales of the Arabian Nights, a great part of which are of Persian origin; in a thousand unacknowledged ways the west has been taught by the east. When England was a wilderness, inhabited by savages, Persia was polite, cultivated, ingenious, learned and illustrious. Whether we know it or not, we have learned much from them, though the debt is all but ignored except in the writings of scholars.

Moslems took the alien culture of the Greeks much as the Japanese of our own time have taken the culture of Europe. I remember well handing an astrolabe made in England in the seventeenth century, for one of the ships of the Alaskan fleet of Russia, to an accomplished officer of the Japanese navy. He was perfectly familiar with modern navigation and with the sextant, but this classic instrument was a complete puzzle to his mind. The contemporaries of his father had sailed their little boats by timid coasting from headland to headland of the Inland Sea; but no one of them had ever seen a sextant or a quadrant. Like the Arabs of long ago they made one leap from complete ignorance of such matters to the possession of the most refined apparatus, while English navigators, our ancestors, slowly mastered the use of the backstaff, the cross-staff, the astrolabe, the quadrant, the sextant, during a long succession of centuries.

Such considerations as these partly account for the fact that, in spite of their wonderful acumen, the Arabs added little or nothing to the theory of scientific astronomy. Moreover, their religion allowed them but scant liberty. They were confined within the narrow limits of Koranic permissions and prohibitions. It was forbidden to make an image of any living thing either by painting or sculpture. Poetry was