philosophy, the Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics,
have had a deeper motive for their search, a far higher object which
they hope to discover. But indeed, the Mussulmans did not so much wish
to discover truth, as to cultivate their own intellects. For that
purpose a sharp and subtle systematist, like Aristotle, was the very man
whom they required; and from the destruction of Alexandria may date the
rise of the Aristotelian philosophy. Translations of his works were
made into Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac
translations; the former of which had been made during the sixth and
seventh centuries, by the wreck of the Neoplatonist party, during their
visit to the philosophic Chozroos. A century after, they filled
Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and their
successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians, obtained from them
translations of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek works;
while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, had introduced the same
literary taste into Spain, where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes
and Maimonides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at
Bagdad a century before.

But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented nothing;
they only commented. And yet not only commented; for they preserved for
us those works of whose real value they were so little aware. Averroes,
in quality of commentator on Aristotle, became his rival in the minds of
the mediaeval schoolmen; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on
Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European
physicians; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on
Ptolemy, not however without making a few important additions to his
knowledge; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third inequality of the moon's
motion, in addition to the two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did,
according to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner--an