The Moslem became also the rival of the Christian in commerce. The ships which in the lull of hostilities sailed from the ports of France and Italy met the richly laden vessels of Egypt and Spain in exhausting competition for the trade of the Mediterranean. The coast of North Africa was the lurking-place of pirates, who darted over the Great Sea with the celerity of spiders along their web, and seized every craft that weakness or misfortune made their prey. With his wealth the Moslem often won his way to social position, and even invaded the family relations of his Christian neighbor. Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, if not a real character, was at least one typical not only of the fifteenth, but of earlier centuries. The plot of this play was borrowed by the English dramatist from the Venetian romances. More than one Desdemona had braved the curses of her Christian kindred for the fascinations of the Infidel; many a renegade Iago was found in his service; and often the Christian dignitary, like Brabantis, was led by gold and political advantage to assent that his daughter should “run from her guardage to the sooty bosom” of the Moor. Yet these misalliances did not destroy the common sentiment of the Christians against the Saracens. The foul sensuality allowed by the Koran as it thus touched the homes of Europe deepened the racial antipathy of the people who were still monogamic in their faith and customs. The Mohammedan menace was further augmented in the superstitious notions of the age by the intellectual ascendency of the Saracens. Christendom did not discern that, in the mass of evils brought upon Europe by the invasions from the East, there were the germs of its own quickening, as the freshets of the Nile enrich the land of Egypt. If, in the first heat of his zealotry, the Saracen destroyed the library of Alexandria, regarding the Koran as compensation for all the books of Christian and pagan wisdom, yet in the light of the flames he saw his mistake, and became the most liberal patron of education. To the mosque he added the school. While the rest of Europe was in the density of the Dark Ages, the Moorish universities of Spain were the beacons of the revival of learning. The Christian teacher was still manipulating the bones of the saints when the Arab physician was making a _materia medica_ and practising surgery. By the discovery of strong acids the Moor laid the basis of the science of chemistry; by the adoption of the Hindu numerals he improved arithmetic. He first practically used, if he did not invent, algebra; introduced astronomy to the European student; wrote on optics, the weight and height of the atmosphere, gravity, capillary attraction; applied the pendulum to the measurement of time, and guessed that the earth was round. In the superstition of Christian Europe these studies were regarded, if not as belonging to the magic arts, at least as