While readers in general possess but little information about Maimonides himself, the period in which he lived, and which derives much of its brilliancy and importance from him, is well known, and has come to be a favorite subject with modern writers. That period was a very dreamland of culture. Under enlightened caliphs, the Arabs in Spain developed a civilization which, during the whole of the middle ages up to the Renaissance, exercised pregnant influence upon every department of human knowledge. A dreamland, in truth, it appears to be, when we reflect that the descendants of a highly cultured people, the teachers of Europe in many sciences, are now wandering in African wilds, nomads, who know of the glories of their past only through a confused legend, holding out to them the extravagant hope that the banner of the Prophet may again wave from the cathedral of Granada. Yet this Spanish-Arabic period bequeathed to us such magnificent tokens of architectural skill, of scientific research, and of philosophic thought, that far from regarding it as fancy's dream, we know it to be one of the corner-stones of civilization. Prominent among the great men of this period was the Jew Moses ben Maimon, or as he was called in Arabic, Abu Amran Musa ibn Maimûn Obaid Allah (1135-1204). It may be said that he represented the full measure of the scientific attainments of the age at the close of which he stood--an age whose culture comprised the whole circle of sciences then known, and whose conscious goal was the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. The sturdier the growth of the spirit of inquiry, the more ardent became the longing to reach this goal, the keener became the perception of the problems of life and faith. Arabic and Jewish thinkers zealously sought the path leading to serenity. Though they never entered upon it, their tentative efforts naturally prepared the way for a great comprehensive intellect. Only a genius, master of all the sciences, combining soundness of judgment and clearness of insight with great mental vigor and depth, can succeed in reconciling the divergent principles of theology and speculation, if such reconciliation be within the range of the possible. At Cordova, in 1135, when the sun of Arabic culture reached its zenith, was born Maimonides, the man gifted with this all-embracing mind.