68 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY of learning to which Christian ignorance went for its early education. Their courts were homes envied openly by the most distinguished of European kings. Among the celebrated pupils of Arab teachers, Roger Bacon, Peter the Venerable, Pope Sylvester II., are illustrious names which occur at once to the memory, and up to the end of the fifteenth century there was scarcely a man of eminence or learning in the schools of England, France, or Italy, whose biography, when it has been preserved, does not acknowledge the debt which he owed directly or indirectly to Arab learning. Arabian knowledge of the physical conditions of the Universe remained far in advance of anything known to Europe until near the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. The entire medical faculty of the Continent was trained in Arab schools. That they maintained this high place in the front rank of science through all the decadence of their later history, is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that when, at the moment of the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the Catholic Cardinal Ximenes ordered the destruction of the libraries of Granada, he reserved from the general condemnation three hundred medical works, to which Europe recognised its obligation.

There is no department of our daily life upon which the Arabs have not left their mark. Not only our learning, our laws, our justice, our naval and military science, our agriculture, our commerce, our manufacturing industries, have been profoundly impressed by Arab influence maintained in Europe for upwards of 800 years, but our daily customs, our domestic life, have been no less intimately touched. It is from the Arabs of Spain that we have learned to wash, to dress, to cook, to garden. They improved our musical instruments ; they gave us new poetic metres ; they gave us the imaginative pleasures of narrative fiction. From them France and Italy borrowed the lighter play of wit and repartee, which has since radiated through the northern races. From them