when weak or sleepy, I strengthened myself with a glass of wine." This latter habit unfortunately grew upon him, and Barhebræus somewhat rashly asserts that Avicenna was the first philosopher addicted to strong drink. At sixteen he had mastered everything except the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Forty times did he read that abstruse work till he knew the words by heart, but was no nearer to their meaning. But one day being offered the commentary of Abu Nasr al-Farab at the ridiculously cheap price of three dirhems (eighteenpence), he bought it, and found there the key of the mystery. Then, having given thanks to God and alms to the poor, he started on his travels. Passing over forty years of an adventurous life, we find the great physician, worn out by excesses physical and mental, dying at Hamadan. When he saw that medicines had no more effect, he resigned himself to the inevitable, sold his goods and gave to the poor, and, betaking himself to his bed, read the Koran once through every three days, till he died in the holy month RamadanJune, 1037.

Avicenna was not only a physician, but also an astronomer, poet, philosopher, and statesman. Of the 100 works ascribed to him only about twelve are medical, but as few besides these have been translated into European languages, it is as a physician that he is usually estimated. His chief medical book, the Canon, not only superseded the similar works of Rhazes and Haly Abbas, but, when translated into Latin, overshadowed for a time even the writings of Galen, and for four centuries formed the chief text-book of European medicine. Yet the Canon is admitted even by the Arabs themselves to be inferior in practical value and originality to the Maleki and the Continens, and its Latin translation is so dry and tedious that even the indefatigable Haller, who read the Continens with pleasure, admits his inability to get through the Canon, which he characterises as a "methodica inanitas". The reader may be content with the shortest and one of the most generally useful of its innumerable chapters. Book iii., Fen. vi., tract iii., cap. xx., “On driving

away moths: Wormwood protects clothes from moths, likewise calamint, likewise lemon-peel". But let us not, therefore, despise the work, still less its author; but rather look for the reasons for its wonderful success. Avicenna was greater as a philosopher than as a physician, and his object in the Canon was to reconcile the doctrines of Aristotle with those of Galen, just as St. Thomas Aquinas, two centuries' later, reconciled them with those of the Catholic Church. Thus, in speaking of the causation of diseases, he discusses not only the primitive (exciting,, antecedent (predisposing), and conjoint (proximate, causes of Galen, but also the material, formal, effectual, and final causes of Aristotle, a combination which could not fail to impress the mediæval physician, who held that where Galen and Aristotle differed none could decide, and that where they agreed none could dissent.

Avicenna's scientific works are, perhaps, more worthy of his fame, and the treatise On the Uselessness of Astrology, had it been translated, might have benefited medicine more than the Canon. If the work On Petrifactions is really by him, Avicenna may claim the title of Father of Geology, and the following extract might have been published as something new more than eight centuries later: “On the Origin of Mountains.—Mountains are produced in two ways, either by elevations of the earth's crust, as in earthquakes, or by the action of water, which has hollowed out the valleys at the same time; for there are harder and softer tracts, and wind and water remove the latter while leaving the former. Many ages (multa tempora) have been required to produce this, and perhaps the mountains are now getting smaller. That water has been the chief agent is shown by the marks of aquatic and other animals found on many rocks."

NOTE.

Sinan further distinguished himself by his zeal for the improvement of prisons and the care of sick criminals, and is called by Von Hammer

"the Howard of Islam". Like the Mesuës and Bachtishuas he belonged to a medical family, though his father, Tsabet ben Corra, is better known as a philosopher, and his son, Tsabet ben Sinan, as a historian. Of another son, Abul Hassan, the following story is told: When Adad-adaula, the Buide, came to Bagdad, 976, the two poles of medicine in that city were Abul Hassan ben Sinan and Abul Hassan alHarrani. They presented themselves before him. "Who are these? ? " asked the Emir. "Two celebrated physicians." "I am well, and don't want them," and they left the audience chamber in confusion. But in a few minutes they again craved admission, and Ben Sinan said: "Allah prolong the Emir's life! It is the object of our art not only to cure disease, but also to maintain health, which rulers need above all men." "You are right," said Adad, and bidding them sit down he settled large salaries upon them, and was ever afterwards a liberal patron of the profession. Haly Abbas dedicated the Royal Book to him.

Rhazes, Continens, Venice, 1542; Opera Parva, Lyons, 1510; On the Small-pox and Measles, Sydenham Society, 1858. This last contains an excellent biography. Isaac Judæus, Opera, Lyons, 1515; the Aphorisms have been translated into Italian by Soave, from whom they are quoted by Haeser, i. 564. Haly Abbas, Liber Totius Medicina, Lyons, 1523; Thierfelder (in Henschel's Janus, vol. i.) proposes a third hypothesis, viz., that the genuine Royal Book has disappeared, and a treatise by Isaac Judæus been substituted for it, but most authorities adopt the view taken in the text. Avicenna, Canon Medicina, Lyons, 1522. The fullest biography is that given by Von Hammer (Literaturgeschichte).

XXX.-ARABIC MEDICINE. (3) THE WESTERN CALIPHATE.

UNDER the prosperous rule of Abdur-rahman III., Al-Hakem II., and Al-Mansur the Regent (912-1002), Cordova, capital of the Western Caliphate, was worthy of its ancient Phoenician name, Carta-Tuba, the great city. Its 200,000 houses may have contained 1,000,000 inhabitants, whose wants, bodily, spiritual, and mental, were not unfairly provided for by 600 inns, 900 baths, 600 mosques, each with its free school attached, and including the whole province, 17 universities, and 70 public libraries. The library of AlHakem might have vied with that of Alexandria, for, ac

cording to the lowest estimate, it contained 225,000 volumes, each of which had been read and annotated by the Caliph himself, if we may believe an admiring chronicler, who seems to forget that this implies a voracity of six volumes daily for a century. In an age when nobles and ladies were unable to sign their own names, there was hardly a boy or girl over twelve in the whole city and province who could not both read and write, and the adventurous Christian who penetrated to Cordova in pursuit of " Saracenic studies" rarely escaped being accused of unlawful dealings with those powers of darkness by whose aid alone the infidels could have acquired such wisdom. Michael the Scot is well known to readers of the modern Wizard of the North. Gerbert the Frank studied medicine among other things in Spain, and taught it at Rheims. We shall meet him again as Pope Sylvester II., and shall find that not even the chair of St. Peter could save one of its most learned and pious occupants from being considered, in a peculiar and terrible manner, the servant of Satan.

Such a civilisation could not fail to produce physicians and philosophers comparable to those of the East, and Rhazes, Haly Abbas, and Avicenna might have found worthy compeers in Albucasis, Avenzoar, and Averröes. The first of these, Abulkasem Khalaf ben Abbas, of Zahra, near Cordova, is sometimes placed last in order of time, but there is good reason to believe that he is the Khalaf ben Abbas who was physician to Al-Hakem II., and that Leo Africanus is, for once, correct in saying that he died A.d. 1013, at the age of 101. He wrote a great medical cyclopædia in thirty or thirty-two books, called the Tasrif, or Method, but this would only deserve mention as one of the numerous similar works superseded by the Canon of Avicenna were it not for the last, or surgical book, which was published separately, and which marks an epoch in medical history. It was at once the first independent work on surgery, and the first illustrated treatise on that art. The practitioners of the thirteenth century borrowed from it far

more frequently than they cared to confess, and Guy of Chauliac, the greatest of mediæval surgeons, quotes it more than 200 times. Albucasis begins by saying that Arabic surgery is in a bad way owing to the ignorance of anatomy. "I have seen a surgeon incise a scrofulous swelling in a woman's neck; he stuck his knife into the cervical artery, and the patient fell dead in his arms. I have seen another extract a large stone; he got out the stone, but brought part of the bladder with it; the patient died on the third day." "Surgical operations," he continues, "are of two kinds, those which benefit the patient, and those which usually kill him," and he intends that a description of the dangers to be feared in various procedures shall form a special feature of his work. The first of the three chapters is entirely occupied with the manifold uses of the cautery, the favourite instrument of the Arab surgeon, and the book ends as it began, with his favourite watchword, "Caution! " "Avoid perilous practices, as I have already warned you, so shall you have the more praise and profit, if God will. . This is the end of the book called Al-Tasrif, written for those who have not the entire works of Abulkasem Khalaf ben Abbas the Zahraite, on whom may God have mercy if he finishes his life in the good way."

The other books of the Tasrif contain much interesting matter. Thus the following reminds us of a well-known case quoted in Scott's Demonology: "I saw a boy, a patient of mine for epilepsy, who said that, when he was about to have a fit, a black woman seemed to come up to him dressed in the skin called 'parua,' and as soon as she reached him he fell down" (i. 2, 34). Albucasis seems to have given the first account of hæmophilia : "I found men in a certain village who told me that whenever they suffered a severe wound, it bled till they were dead, and they added that when a child rubbed his gums they began to bleed, and went on bleeding till he died. Another also having had a vein opened by a phlebotomist bled to death; and they said that, in general, most of them died thus. I have never