48 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY market till it came, "a beautiful copy, elegantly written." He immediately bid for it and increased his bidding, but to his great disappointment he was outbid, though the price was beyond the value of the book. The book went to his competitor. He approached to congratulate the learned owner, but the man who had acquired it said : ** I am no Doctor ; neither do I know what the contents of the book are ; but I am making a library, and there is a vacant space which, as my means are ample, I resolved to fill with this volume." The reader echoes with sympathy the reply of the Doctor : ''It is ever so ; he gets the nut who has no teeth."

Cordova was not singular in its literary reputation. All the great towns had good libraries, and the Arabs in Andalusia had a handwriting of their own which they adopted at some period subsequent to their arrival in Spain. It has already been mentioned that one of the distinctions by which it has been made possible to learned French research to trace the different origin of the civilisation of Eastern and Western Negroland is the employment of the Eastern alphabet of Arabia and Egypt in the one, and the Western alphabet of Morocco and Spain in the other. In addition to the geometricians, astronomers, geographers, mechanicians, botanists, chemists, physicians, who appear to have collected all that was known in Asia as well as Europe, and who wrote voluminously— the works of many of them amounting to fifty and sixty volumes — every branch of literature was represented. There were histories, essays, poems ; there were treatises upon arithmetic, grammar, poetry, rhetoric, canon and civil law, jurisprudence, logic. Lists of distinguished writers have been preserved in biographical dictionaries which have escaped destruction, and it is therefore possible to some extent to reconstruct the intellectual life of the day. It would appear to have been active, charming, polished. The Arabs claimed for their children and their women that they had a natural gift for poetry, narrative, and repartee. They appear to have had a sufficient