How the knight and priest withdrew from the chapel after the tombstone had been replaced, in the redoubled gloom of the night, “with wavering steps and with dizzy brain,” imagining the walls of the chapel echoing with fiendish laughter as they retreated, is recounted dramatically enough by the bard of the Scottish border. We are, perhaps, more interested to know what manner of man this Michael Scot was, and how far these records of his magical powers are based on anything more than unauthenticated tradition. The facts we possess with regard to Michael Scot’s career convince us indeed that he was a man of the greatest erudition and learning, and far in advance of his contemporaries in these respects. He was a noted mathematician, and not content with gaining the highest honours in the schools of Paris of that day, he subsequently pursued his studies at the fountain-head of mathematical and alchemical research at Toledo in Spain. For it must be remembered that we owe the basis of our mathematical knowledge primarily to the Arabs who introduced to Europe not only the Arabic numerals in place of the cumbrous Roman figures, but also the study of Algebra, itself an Arabic word. To the Arabs, too, we owe the basis of our Chemistry—a word that is, of course, synonymous with Alchemy, which again bears the stamp of its Arabian origin. It is curious indeed to note how far the civilisation of the Arab was in advance of that of the greater part of Europe in those days. Five hundred years before Michael Scot took ship from Sicily for Spain, the Arabs had advanced across the whole of Northern Africa, conquering Egypt, Tripoli, Algeria, and Morocco in turn, and finally crossing to Spain and there establishing a separate kaliphate in the eighth century of the Christian era. The invasion of Spain by the Arabs introduced into the Iberian peninsula a literary culture of a kind till then quite unknown. Under the sway of the Moorish sovereigns the arts and architecture flourished, and science found a welcome which it met with nowhere else in Christianised Europe.