He has an exceedingly difficult task to perform, because the multiplicity and confusion of details, as well as the area to be covered are very great; but he has managed to give the main features in good relief and without loss of proportion. I have already spoken of the few sentences here and there where his obsession against the Catholic Church betrays him into folly, sometimes puerile, sometimes mixed with startling ignorance, but the occasions for this sort of thing are rare, for he is dealing with a time and place in which the Christian religion was overwhelmed. I expected, with some anxiety, the presence in this division of some one of those anti-Christian sneers (which he might have got from Gibbon or some other Voltairean authority) upon the Christians in Spain, but I am glad to say that he has omitted any such—for the very good reason that he does not here deal with Spain under the Moors. He does justice, but not more than justice, to the beauty of detail in Arabic architectural work, and has properly noted in his authorities the literary beauty of which all those authorities assure us—though very few of us (and certainly neither Mr. Wells nor I)—can judge it for ourselves. His great virtue of accuracy in detail also appears in his presentation of the Arabic contribution to mathematics. What he quotes tends slightly to exaggeration (for instance, the measurement of the angle of the ecliptic is not an Arabic discovery, but was open to anyone to make to within a fraction of a degree, at any time, for centuries, before Mohammed. It was as a fact made by the Greek civilization, centuries before). He gives his right place to Averroës, though to say of this great mind that it “made a sharp distinction between Religious and Scientific truth and so prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from theological dogmatism, both under Christianity and under Islam,” is out of proportion. What Averroës did was to propound a beginning of something very like atheism or at the best pantheism. Nor was there any sort of proportion between the restraint upon physical dogmatism and vagary then exercised (and happily still exercised) by the supreme force of Catholic theology and the corresponding restraint created by the much too simple system of Islam.