er great obligations to him.
Reverence for Jewish medical ability was so exaggerated in those days
that Galen was identified with the Jewish sage Gamaliel. The error was
fostered in the _Sefer Asaf_, a curious medical fragment of uncertain
authorship and origin, by its rehearsal of an old Midrash, which traces
the origin of medicine to Shem, son of Noah, who received it from
angels, and transmitted it to the ancient Chaldeans, they in turn
passing it on to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Arabs.

Though the birth of medicine is not likely to have taken place among
Jews, it is indisputable that physicians of the Jewish race are largely
to be credited with the development of medical science at every period.
At the time we speak of, Jews in Egypt, northern Africa, Italy, Spain,
France, and Germany were physicians in ordinary to caliphs, emperors,
and popes, and everywhere they are represented among medical writers.
The position occupied in the Arabian world by Israeli, in the Occident
was occupied by Sabattai Donnolo, one of the Salerno school in its early
obscure days, the author of a work on _Materia medica_, possibly the
oldest original production on medicine in the Hebrew language.

The period of Jewish prosperity in Spain has been called a fairy vision
of history. The culture developed under its genial influences pervaded
the middle ages, and projected suggestions even into our modern era. One
of the most renowned _savants_ at the beginning of the period was the
statesman Chasdai ben Shaprut, whose translation of Dioscorides's "Plant
Lore" served as the botanical textbook of mediaeval Europe. The first
poet was Solomon ibn Gabirol, the author of "The Source of Life," a
systematic exposition of Neoplatonic philosophy, a book of most curious
fortunes. Through the Latin translation, made with the help of an
apostate Jew, and bearing the author's name in the mutilated form of
Avencebrol, later changed into Avicebron, scholasticism became saturated
with its philosophic ideas. The pious fathers of Christian philosophy,
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, took pains to refute them, while
Duns Scotus and Giordano Bruno frequently consulted the work as an
authority. In the struggle between the Scotists and the Thomists it had
a prominent place as late as the fourteenth century, the contestants
taking it to be the work of some great Christian philosopher standing on
the threshold of the Occident and at the portals of philosophy. So i