Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/17

Rh manuscripts were, at first, preserved in churches, and later, in convents and abbeys, where they were copied and recopied and sold at high prices. It is, finally, to the church that we owe their preservation. Wars and strifes were not so fatal to manuscripts in the west as in the east. When Constantinople was taken by the Crusaders (1204), thousands of manuscripts perished. Many others were lost in its three great conflagrations, but in spite of these misfortunes thousands of volumes were preserved and have come down to us. The fragment that has been saved may give some notion of the magnitude of the original collections. Ximenes in the beginning of the sixteenth century burned 80,000 manuscripts in the public squares of Grenada. The magnificent collection of the Escurial comes from Morocco, and at least half of it was destroyed by the fire of 1671.

The Abbaside caliphs were liberal patrons of learning, as was the fashion of their time and race. Harun's quick intelligence was interested in scientific matters and he had very wise advisers. Al-Mamun was even more interested. To patronize science and the arts was a part of the state of a sultan. It had to do with Aristotle's virtue of magnificence, now erased from our list of cardinal excellences. The Almagest was first translated by learned Jews in the reign of Harun al-Easchid (765-809), and an observatory had been maintained by his predecessors at Damascus. His son, Al-Mamun (786-833) erected a magnificent establishment at Bagdad in 829, sixty-seven years after the foundation of the city. The Arab instruments were fashioned from descriptions given by Ptolemy, but they were much larger and far more accurate than those of the Greeks. Moreover, the Arab astronomers observed the heavenly bodies continuously, and this habit led them to a more precise knowledge of the elements of planetary motion. The attitude of an oriental monarch towards learning is well illustrated by a paragraph from the Memoirs of Tamerlane. Tamerlane was nearly a savage, but he had learned from contact with polite nations the fashion of kings, and it is interesting and significant that he cared to be in the fashion. He says:

Men learned in medicine and skilled in the art of healing, and astrologers and mathematicians, who are essential to the dignity of empire, I drew around me; and by the aid of physicians and surgeons I gave health to the sick; with, the assistance of astrologers I ascertained the benign or malevolent aspect of the stars, their motions, and the revolution of the heavens; and with the aid of geometricians and architects I laid out gardens and planned and constructed magnificent buildings. At the Court of Akbar (1575) there were thirty-eight doctors of the law and theologians, sixty-nine literati, fifteen physicians, one hundred and fifty-three poets, besides historians, artists, astrologers, three Jesuits, and translators, scribes and clerks without number.

Arab history shows, however, that culture and the desire for culture never penetrated the mass of the people. They were rigid Moslems;