Pupils from France and other European countries repaired to Spain in great numbers, to study mathematics and medicine under the Arabs. There were fourteen academies, with many preparatory and upper schools, in Spain, and five very considerable public libraries; that of the Caliph Hakem containing, as is said, more than 600,000 volumes.
In Geography, History, Philosophy, Medicine, Physics, and Mathematics the Arabians rendered important services to science; and the Arabic words still employed in science—such as algebra, alcohol, azimuth, zenith, nadir, with many names of stars, etc. (see The Arabian Heavens, pages 106-120 of Vol. I)—remain as indications of their influence on the early intellectual culture of Europe. But Geography owes most to them during the Middle Ages. In Africa and Asia, the boundaries of geographical science were extended, and the old Arab treatises on geography and works of travels in several countries by Abulfeda, Edrisi, Leo Africanus, Ibn Batuta, Ibn Foslan, Ibn Jobair, Albiruni the astronomer, and others, are still interesting.
The structure of the earth received little attention from the ancients; the extent of its surface known was limited, and the changes upon it were neither so speedy nor violent as to excite special attention. The only opinions deserving to be noticed are those of Pythagoras and Strabo, both of whom observed the phenomena which were then altering the surface of the earth, and proposed theories for explaining the changes that had taken place in geological time. The first held that, in addition to volcanic action, the change in the level of sea and land was owing to the retiring of the sea; while the other maintained that the land changed its level, and not the sea, and that such changes happened more easily to the land below the sea because of its humidity.
From the fall of the Roman empire, during the Dark Ages, the physical sciences were neglected. In the Tenth Century, Avicenna, Omar, and other Arabian writers commented on the works of the Romans, but added little of their own.
Geological phenomena attracted attention in Italy in the Sixteenth Century, the absorbing question then being as to the nature of fossils; only a few maintained that they were the remains of animals. Two centuries elapsed before the opinion was generally adopted.
Aristotle was the first who collected, in his work On Meteors, the current prognostics of the weather. Some of these were derived from the Egyptians, who had studied the science as a branch of Astronomy, while a considerable number were the result of his own observation. The next writer upon this subject was Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s pupils, who classified the opinions commonly received regarding the weather under four heads, viz., the prognostics of rain, of wind, of storm, and of fine weather. The subject was discussed purely in its popular and practical bearings, and no attempt was made to explain phenomena whose occurrence appeared so irregular and capricious. Cicero, Virgil, and a few other writers also wrote on the subject; but the treatise of Theophrastus contains nearly all that was known down to comparatively recent times. Partial explanations were attempted by Aristotle and Lucretius, but their explanations were vague, and often absurd.
In this dormant condition meteorology remained for ages, and no progress was made till proper instruments were invented for making real observations with regard to the temperature, the pressure, the humidity, and the electricity of the air.
Solomon spoke of “trees, from the cedar in Lebanon even to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.” There is reason also to believe that Zoroaster devoted some attention to plants, and that this study early engaged some of the philosophers of Greece. The oldest botanical work which has come down to us is that of Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, who flourished in the fourth century B. C. His descriptions of plants are very unsatisfactory, but his knowledge of their organs and of vegetable physiology may well be deemed wonderful. It was not, indeed, till after the revival of letters in Western Europe, that it was ever again studied as it had been by him. About four hundred years after Theophrastus, in the First Century of the Christian era, Dioscorides of Anazarbus, in Asia Minor—a herbalist, however, rather than a botanist—described more than 600 plants in a work which continued in great repute throughout the Middle Ages.
About the same time, the elder Pliny devoted a share of his attention to Botany, and his writings contain some account of more than 1,000 species, compiled from various sources and mingled with many errors. Centuries elapsed without producing another name worthy to be mentioned. It was among the Arabians that the science next began to be cultivated, about the close of the Eighth Century. The greatest name of this period is Avicenna. Among the Arabs, Botany, like Chemistry, was chiefly studied as subsidiary to medicine; but as an adjunct to the old herbal pharmacopœia, it received close attention. The principal mercurial and arsenical preparations of the materia medica, the sulphates of several metals, the properties of acids and alkalies, the distillation of alcohol—in fine, whatever resources chemistry availed itself of up to a very recent date—were, with their practical application, known to Er-Razi and Geber. In fact, the numerous terms borrowed from the Arabic language—for instance, alcohol, alkali, alembic, and others—with the signs of drugs and the like, still in use among modern apothecaries, remain to show how deeply this science is indebted to Arab research.
Aristotle seems to have been the first to study Zoology. Some of the groups he established still retain their place in the most modern classifications. His two great sections of the Animal Kingdom consisted of Enanima (red blood) and Anima (having a circulation of colorless fluid). Ælian and Pliny wrote on the subject, but they indulged largely in fables. There was little advance in the science during the Dark and Middle Ages. The Bestiaries were written for the sake of moral teaching, and the animals had to behave with that end in view. Albertus Magnus is the only famous name in this department before the revival of learning.