[2650] Singer (1917), pp. 45 and 51, has noted that Hildegard’s description of the brain as divided into three chambers is anteceded by the Liber de humana natura of Constantinus, and contained “in the writings of St. Augustine.”
[2651] PL 40, 795, cap. 22.
[2652] De proprietatibus rerum, III, 10 and 16; V, 3.
[2653] Similarly E. G. Browne (1921), p. 123, writing of Arabian medicine and Avicenna, says, “Corresponding with the five external senses, taste, touch, hearing, smelling, and seeing, are the five internal senses, of which the first and second, the compound sense (or ‘sensus communis’) and the imagination, are located in the anterior ventricle of the brain; the third and fourth, the co-ordinating and emotional faculties, in the mid-brain; and the fifth, the memory, in the hind-brain.” Galen had somewhat similar ideas.
[2654] De Genesi ad litteram, VII, 18 (PL 34, 364).
[2655] The fullest treatment of him will be found in D. A. Chwolson, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, Petrograd, 1856, 2 vols., passim. For a list of his works see Steinschneider. Zeitschrift f. Math., XVIII, 331-38.
[2656] There is some difficulty with these dates or their Arabic equivalents, because we are not certain whether the length of his life is given in lunar or solar years: see Chwolson, I, 532-3, 547-8.
[2657] Bridges, I, 394.
[2658] Carra de Vaux, Avicenne, Paris, 1900, p. 68.
[2659] Chwolson, II, 406, 422, 431, 440, 453, 610, 703.