In agreeing to follow this method of question and answer Adelard explains at the start that on account of the prejudice of the present generation against any _modern_[45] discoveries he will attribute even his own ideas to someone else, and that, if what he says proves displeasing to less advanced students because unfamiliar, the blame for this should be attached to the Arabs and not to himself. “For I am aware what misfortunes pursue the professors of truth among the common crowd. Therefore it is the cause of the Arabs that I plead, not my own.”[46] This is a very interesting passage in more ways than one. Adelard appears as an exponent of the new scientific school, stimulated by contact with Arabian culture. He is confident that he has valuable new truth, but is less confident as to the reception which it will receive. The hostility, however, in the Latin learned world is not, as one might expect, to Mohammedan learning. The process of taking over Arabic learning has apparently already begun--as indeed we have seen from our previous chapters--and Adelard’s Christian friends are ready enough to hear what he has learned in Mohammedan lands and schools, although of course they may not accept it after they have heard it. But he fears that he “would not get a hearing at all,” if he should put forward new views as his own. Indeed, he himself shows a similar prejudice against other novelties than his own in a passage in the _De eodem_, where he speaks impatiently and contemptuously of “those who harass our ears with daily novelties” and of “the new Platos and Aristotles to whom each day gives birth, who with unblushing front proclaim alike things which they know and of which they know nothing, and whose supreme trust is in extreme verbosity.”[47] Adelard of course regarded his own new ideas as of more solid worth than these, but the fact remains that he was not after all the only one who was interested in promulgating novelties. Yet his justification for writing the _De eodem_ is the silence of “the science of the moderns” compared with the fluency of the ancients, of whose famous writings he has read “not all, but the greater part.”[48] It is not necessary, of course, to regard this passage and the preceding as inconsistent, but it is well to read the one in the light of the other. [Sidenote: Medieval work wrongly credited to Greek and Arab.]