the
attitude of the earlier Moslem rulers to education. Omar was asked what
should be done with the more than two million volumes. He said that the
books in it either agreed with the Koran, or they did not. If they
agreed with it they were quite useless. If they did not, they were
pernicious. In either case, they should be done away with, because there
was an element of danger in them. Accordingly, the precious volumes that
had been accumulating for nearly ten centuries, served, it is said, to
heat the baths of Alexandria for some six months--probably the most
precious fuel ever used. Fortunately for posterity, the edict was not
quite as universal in its application as the story would indicate, and
exceptions were made for books of science.

In the course of their conquests, however, the Mohammedan Arabs captured
the Greek cities of Asia Minor. They were brought closely in contact
with Greek culture, Greek literature, and Greek thought. As has always
been the case, captive Greece took its captors captive. What happened to
the Romans earlier came to pass also among the Arabs. Inspired by Greek
philosophy, science, and literature, they became ardent devotees of
science and the arts. While not inventing or discovering anything new,
like the Romans they carried on the old. Damascus, Basra, Bagdad,
Bokhara, Samarcand all became centres of culture and of education. Large
sums were paid for Greek manuscripts, and for translations from them.
Under the famous Harun al-Raschid, at the end of the eighth century,
whose name is better known to us than that of any others, because of the
stories of his wandering by night among his people in order to see if
justice were done, three hundred scholars were sent at the cost of the
Caliph to the various parts of the world in order to bring back
treasures of science, and especially of geography and medicine. It is an
interesting historical reflection that the Japanese and Chinese are
doing the same thing now.

The Arabs were very much taken by the philosophy of Aristotle, and it
became the foundation of all their education. Greek thought, as always,
inspired its students to higher things. Soon everywhere in the dominions
of the Caliphs, philosophy, science, art, literature, and education
nourished. Medicine was taken up with the other sciences and cultivated
assiduously. Freind, in his "Historia Medicinae," says that the writings
of the old Greeks which treated of medicine were saved from d