grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library,
took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever
strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the
Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be
destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very
different. As they settled in the various countries which they
conquered, education seems to have been considered by them an important
object. We even find some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed,
obeying strictly the Prophet's command to send all captive children to
school--a fact which speaks as well for the Mussulmans' good sense, as
it speaks ill for the state of education among the degraded descendants
of the Greek conquerors of the East. Gradually philosophic Schools
arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on
the task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste
Syntaxis--which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which
it was so long known during the Middle Ages.

But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or
mystic element in their commentaries. It seems as if Alexandria was
preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of
commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, that
Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the
simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems
to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism. He
maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had
entirely misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him
with Plato, or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. Aristotle was
henceforth the text-book of Arab savants. It was natural enough. The
Mussulman mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience to the
authority of fixed dogmas. All those attempts to follow out metaphysic