st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

"
ON NATURAL SCIENCE.
167
of originality ;
of being discoverers as well as pre
servers. The ever-present reminder of our debt in
the Arabic numerals, and the occurrence of Arabic
terms in chemistry and astronomy, may blind us to
the fact that the Saracens gave us little but what
they had themselves received. Even the science of
algebra, referred to by Hallam, whose Arabic name
seems to bespeak for it a purely Arabic origin, was
not invented by them ; they simply extended and im
proved the system of 1
Diophantus. It is the more
necessary to be clear on this point, since the way of
speaking found in some authors might cause it to be
imagined that not only the physical science, but the
philosophy, of modern Europe had its source in the
Arabian peninsula. Warton, for instance, in com
menting on the works read by Chaucer s Doctour of
Phisicke :
speaks of
as
Well knew he the old Esculapius,
And Dioscorides, and eke Rufus,
Old Hippocrates, Haly, and Galen,
Serapion, Rasis, and Avicen,
Averrois, Damascene, Constantine,
Bernard, and Gattisden, and Gilbertin,
"
the Aristotelian
or Arabian philosophy
Spain and
"
continuing to be communicated from
1
The writer whom the Arabians regard as the inventor of
their system of Algebra, Mahommed Ben Musa, or Moses,
lived about the middle of the ninth century, some five hundred
years after the work of Diophantus appeared. The improve
ments they made in the science do not appear to have been
"
great. See the article on
Algebra" in the Encyckp.
Britannica (1865),
i. p. 512.