relics of the Roman schools, handed on in prose or verse compilations which the teacher read to his class, and explained so far as he could. It seems that medicine was not taught formally until so ordered, in 805, by Charlemagne; probably by the advice of Alcuin, the founder of the learned tradition at Fulda, the founder, we may almost say, of the neo-latin period, and some time headmaster of my own school of St Peter at York. The influence of the School of Salerno, relatively excellent as it was in the domains of clinical medicine and of public health, never made its way into the general stream of Western culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the Nestorians from Antioch to Persia; Hebrew and Syrian sages[49] translated some classical texts, and from these again the Arabs, in their brief and brilliant culture, made translations; for no Arab sage knew Greek. The palace of the Spanish Caliphs in the tenth century was a workshop of translators, and a huge storehouse of books. The learned and ubiquitous Jew carried texts and translations from Bagdad to Morocco, and from Morocco to Toledo, Paris, Oxford and Cologne; but translations made in Bagdad in the ninth century did not reach Paris till the eleventh or twelfth. Among the earliest of these renderings in the West were works on medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which in the Schools of Toledo and Cordova, by Constantinus Africanus at Monte Cassino (including certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen), by Gerard of Cremona (a Salernitan scholar), by Michael the wizard[50], and by other hands, were converted into Latin; and, thus doubly disguised, and half buried in glosses which not only overlaid the text (“oscura glossa dov’ é piana la lettera”) but often supplanted it, were received with pathetic eagerness by the ardent scholars of the West. Aristotle, for instance, was now taught in the schools of the West from a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arab commentary upon an Arab translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek text[51]. Even in the sixteenth century medicine and anatomy were taught wholly from books; and teachers were forbidden to use other than prescribed books. Students began with the “Articella” of the Venetian physician Gregorio Volpi, a compendium of translations with woodcuts, published in 1491; they advanced to the Aphorisms, the Diet in Acute Diseases and the Prognostics of Hippocrates, overlaid with Syriac, Arabic and Spanish apparatus and glosses; to the Ars Parva of Galen; to the first and fifth Canons of Avicenna, with glosses; to the IXth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of the translations of Constantinus Africanus[52];—this was the lore that ruled the medical schools even to the birth of Harvey. Disputations among the students were incessant, both “inter se” and “sub cathedrâ”; but it is doubtful whether these did more than sharpen their dialectical wits.