The first effectual movements of new mental life, however, come from contact with the Saracens of Spain. While the Byzantine world let the treasures of old Greek knowledge fall from its hands, the Mohammedans in the East early acquired, at first through the Nestorian Christians, some knowledge of Aristotle and of Greek mathematics, medicine, and astronomy; and this in the progressive Saracen period was passed on to the Moors of Spain. Thence came into the Latin world the beginnings of science, as anciently known, with the beginnings of chemistry, an Arab creation. After the period of John Scotus, all culture had for centuries decayed: the few who cared to read were monks, taught to hold pagan lore in horror; so that at the end of the ninth century even such schooling as the trivium and quadrivium was rare in what had been the realm of Charlemagne; and the later manuals, such as that of St. Remi, were even more puerile than the older. Only from new culture-contacts could new culture arise. One of the most fruitful impulses to such life was the introduction, late in the tenth century, by Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, of an intermediate form of the Arabic notation, making possible the decimal method. Gerbert had acquired in his youthful sojourn on the Spanish march--not among the Moors, as the tradition has it--some knowledge of Arab mathematics and of the logic of Aristotle; and where his predecessors in the cathedral school at Rheims had for the most part shunned the Latin classics, he used them freely in teaching rhetoric. But the impulse he gave to the science of number, so vital alike for astronomy and for chemistry, was his greatest practical service. Those who used his method of calculating were called Gerbertists; and in that still dark age even such knowledge as his gave rise to the belief that he had dealings with the devil.