ARAB CIVILISATION IN SPAIN 37 age of the earth and the lapse of historic time than have ever prevailed before the scientific era of the present day.

History and geography were no less brilliantly represented than the natural sciences. Ibn Said, who wrote in the middle of the thirteenth century, has preserved for us a vivid description of the attainments of the Arabs of Spain. There is no department of science or literature in which he does not claim pre-eminence for them, and supports his claim by lists of names, strange now to the European ear, but, if we may judge by the manner in which they are introduced, familiar enough to the learned of his time. Ibn Said himself is described by his successors as *' the truthful historian." He was the descendant of a line of distinguished men, and tells us that the history of Andalusia, which he carried down to the year 1247, had taken no less than 125 years to write and six authors to complete it. It was conceived and carried to a certain stage by his great-grandfather ; it was taken further by his grandfather ; his two great-uncles worked upon it ; then ''came my father Musa, who certainly was the most learned and experienced of all my ancestors in these matters"; finally, Ibn Said himself completed the work.

It is said that a better history of Andalusia was never written. Contemporary with the earlier part of this composition was the geography of El Idrisi, who wrote about the year 1153. Nearly the whole of this work is still extant. For the purpose of contrasting the state of knowledge of Arabic Spain with the ignorance of the Christian countries of the North, who had yet to wait nearly four hundred years for a true knowledge of the conformation of the earth, the following passage from it may be quoted : — "What results from the opinion of philosophers, learned men, and those skilled in observation of the heavenly bodies, is that the world is round as a sphere, of which the waters are adherent and maintained upon its surface by natural equilibrium. It is surrounded by