Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/502

498 patrons of learning, the Caliph Almansur, who reigned during the second half of the eighth century.

For a period of five hundred years the intellectual activity of the Mediterranean countries was well nigh confined to the Arabs. With what extraordinary diligence the pursuit of foreign learning was made by these erstwhile wanderers is evidenced by the thousands upon thousands of Arabic manuscripts. The library of Hakam at Cordova in Spain contained 400,000 manuscripts; the catalogue alone is in 44 volumes. Original work in science and mathematics did not come from Arabic hands, but the debt of civilization is none the less great as they were long the conservors of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus. The revival of Euclid was brought about by translations made from the Arabic; indeed many important Greek works in all the sciences have come to us only from Arabic sources.

The points of contact of Europeans and the Ottomans were numerous. From Asia Minor at the east to Greece was a well-traveled route; Sicily, Sardinia and Africa were in constant communication with Italy. Moorish Spain was for centuries a meeting place of English, French, Polish and German scholars.

The church played an important role in the spread of the Hindu numerals over Europe, and at the beginning of the thirteenth century in England, France, Germany, Italy and Poland, the arithmetic of the far east was explained by churchmen who had learned of Moorish teachers. However, it remained for a commercial traveler (line he handled is not known) to write the epoch-making work explaining the new doctrine. Leonard of Pisa traveled for business purposes in Africa, Syria, Egypt, Greece and Sicily and incidentally he acquired enough mathematics to make him the greatest mathematician since Archimedes. His Liber Abaci, or book of the abacus, first edition written in 1202, gave the first masterful exposition of the better way to reckon. It was for four centuries the great work of reference in this field.

With the knowledge of the Hindu method spread over all Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century the acceptance of the improvement might be presupposed, but as late as 1520 arithmetics were published entirely in Roman numerals. The logically self-evident step to the right, to decimal fractions, required further centuries for its completion. The step up, to exponents to base ten, was made rather quickly, but has not yet taken its proper place in commercial work.

It is not too much to say that the present development of modern science would be impossible without our number system, yet how slow the world was to accept the reform. Is not the same story being repeated in the United States and England with the decimal system of weights and measures? But the optimistic soul regards chiefly the final acceptance with the comfortable assurance that the forward movement is as sure as it is slow.