s,
and allusions to "Geber's cooks," and "Geber's kitchen," are frequent
among those who at length saw the error of their ways, after wasting
their substance in the vain search for the elixir.

A longer interval might have elapsed but for the voice of Peter the
Hermit, whose fanatical scheme for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre
was the cause of that gradual absorption, by the nations of the West, of
the learning which had so long been buried in the East. The crusaders,
or those, rather, who visited the shores of Syria under their
protection--the men whose skill in medicine and letters rendered them
useful to the invading armies--acquired a knowledge of the Arabian
languages, and of the sciences cultivated by Arabian philosophers, and
this knowledge they disseminated through Europe. Some part of it, it is
true, was derived from the Moors in Spain, but it was all conveyed in a
common tongue which began now to be understood. To this era belong the
names of Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile; of Isaac Beimiram, the son
of Solomon the physician; of Hali Abbas, the scholar of Abimeher Moyses,
the son of Sejar; of Aben Sina, better known as Avicenna, and sometimes
called Abohali; of Averroes of Cordova, surnamed the Commentator; of
Rasis, who is also called Almanzor and Albumasar; and of John of
Damascus, whose name has been latinized into Johannes Damascenus. All
these, physicians by profession, were more or less professors of
alchemy; and besides these were such as Artephius, who wrote alchemical
tracts about the year 1130, but who deserves rather to be remembered for
the cool assertion which he makes in his "Wisdom of Secrets" that, at
the time he wrote he had reached the patriarchal--or fabulous--age of
one thousand and twenty-five years!

The thirteenth century came, and with it came two men who stand first,
as they then stood alone, in literary and scientific knowledge. One was
a German, the other an Englishman; the first was Albertus Magnus, the
last Roger Bacon.

Of the former, many wonderful stories are told: such, for instance, as
his having given a banquet to the king of the Romans, in the gardens of
his cloister at Cologne, when he converted the intensity of winter into
a season of summer, full of flowers and fruits, which disappeared when
the banquet was over; and his having constructed a marvelous automaton,
called "Androis," which, like the invention of his contemporary, Roger
Bacon, was said to be capable o