Brighton, je serais heureux du fait. Je ne pourrais pas d'un autre côté vous dire autre chose que ce que la distance qui nous sépare me force à coucher sur le papier d'une manière plus ou moins confuse. L'adage Sapienti pauca me donne le courage nécessaire pour me retrancher dans de courtes explications. Je suis charmé de la justice que vous rendez à la marche politique du Cabinet Autrichien. Cette marche est conforme à la nature de ce grand corps politique, qui n'a rien à chercher au dehors et au dedans de ses frontières que l'ordre public; et qui dit ordre, dit justice et sagesse.

Veuillez recevoir vous-même, mon cher Mahon, et offrir de ma part et des miens, l'hommage de notre souvenir le plus affectueux.

METTERNICH.

ON THE INFLUENCE OF ARABIC

PHILOSOPHY IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE.

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, ALBEMARLE STREET, FEBRUARY 2, 1866.

FEW things in history are more striking than the encounter, in divers parts of Western Europe, between the rising tide of Mahometan invasion and the settled races of Christendom. In Sicily the Saracens achieved a short-lived conquest, one curious token of which may still be traced in the modern name given to Etna of Mongibello, a name made up of the Latin Mons and the Arabic Ghebel; both words meaning the same, and conjoined together by the mingled races of the time. At the mouth of the Tiber the victory of Pope Leo the Fourth over the Moslem marching on to Rome, even if it failed to be recorded by the Muse of History, would be rescued from oblivion by the Genius of Art, since it forms the subject of one of Raphael's glorious frescoes in the Vatican. More to the northward the Arab conquerors of Spain, advancing into France, had passed the Garonne and well-nigh reached the Loire, when their progress was arrested and hurled back by Charles Martel. Then, after centuries, came the Crusades;

then, after centuries more, the final expulsion of the Moslem from Granada, their last stronghold in Western Europe. All this course of history is more or less familiar to my present hearers. But perhaps they may never have had occasion to observe the remarkable fact, not noticed, indeed, in many histories, that the race which showed itself the inferior in warlike prowess, gained the upper hand in some main points of intellectual influence. While the Moslem had, for the most part, to yield to the Christians on the fields of battle, they acquired an ascendant in the schools of philosophy.

This intellectual or literary influence-a strange portent, surely, in an age of utter intolerance, when it was unusual to allow merit of any kind in a misbeliever, -may be mainly ascribed to two men of high renown, Avicenna and Averroes. Avicenna-whom, if we strove to be quite exact, we should call Aben Sinaflourished in Central Asia, and died in the year of Christ 1037. Averroes-or, more precisely, Aben Roshd--was born at Cordova, and died, according to the best authorities, in the year of our Lord 1198. Both are combined by Dante in two lines of his Inferno, where he enumerates the principal pagan worthies. I will give you Dante's lines as Mr. Cary renders them :

"Orpheus I marked, .

Galenus, Avicen, and him who made
That commentary vast, Averroes." 1

1 "Averroés, che il gran comento feo."

In like manner are they combined by Chaucer in his prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Much may be ascribed to the genius of these two men. Yet in the Middle Ages, when books were few and critics fewer still, we may suspect that the two names were sometimes used in a collective or representative sense. We may think, perhaps, that all the lore of Central Asia was taken as summed up in Avicenna, as in Averroes all the lore of Mahometan Spain.

The works of Avicenna, as is believed, were brought to Europe at the time of the Crusades in the form of a Latin translation, with which alone I have now to deal. This Latin version was put into type very soon after the discovery of printing, and there were several editions in the course of the sixteenth century, above all at Padua and Venice. Most of his treatises relate to his profession of medicine. But there are also some of a more general nature, and bearing on the great questions of philosophy.

The principal work of Avicenna is a so called canon, in five books, on the art of healing. During several centuries, this canon may be said to have reigned supreme in all the Christian schools of medicine. M. Jourdain, writing in the Biographie Universelle, about the year 1811, observes that scarce a century back —in the last years, therefore, of Louis the Fourteenth.— the canon of Avicenna was still the text-book in both the Universities of Montpellier and Louvain. At present, it might be difficult to name any book which is more entirely unread, or has fallen into more complete neglect. One of the last writers who seems to have paid

it attention is Dr. Friend, the famous physician in the time of George the First; and he speaks of it in by no means favourable terms. "In general," says Dr. Friend, "Avicenna seems to be fond of multiplying the signs of distempers without any reason. He often, indeed, sets down some for essential symptoms which arise merely by accident, and have no immediate connection with the primary disease."

Of the numerous remedies which the works of Avicenna recommend, many seem in a high degree fanciful; yet some, perhaps though we are unconscious that they rest on his authority-have survived to the present time. Thus when corals are still placed in the mouths of infant children, in preference to ivory or any other hard substance, we may probably derive that practice from the words of Avicenna, where he declares that there is an occult or mysterious virtue in coral which makes it the highest of all remedies for the comfort of the gums. As is said in the quaint and semi-barbarous Latin of his translated works, "Summus est corallus in confortatione gingiva." In other passages we find him share the common belief of his age as to the planetary influences. "If," he says, "those stars which are called unpropitious are in the ascendant, they bode decay to animated beings; but if those which are called propitious, then the signification is health." In like manner he considers the efficacy of remedies as dependent on the wane or the increase of the moon.

2

Another authority on the healing art, held in high

1 Op., Canon Medicinæ, vol. i. p. 287. Ed. 1608. 2 Op., vol. ii. p. 379.