The writings of Paulus seem to be the last of any written in the Greek language, which had been the language of medical science for more than a thousand years. At about this time the Arabian school was beginning to rise into notice. The earliest Arabian writers on medicine of whom we have any notice or certain account, is Ahrum, who was contemporary with Paulus. The most celebrated physicians of this school were Rhazes, (who flourished in the ninth century, and was the first to describe small-pox) and Avicenna who flourished early in the eleventh century, and whose ‘Canon Medicina’ may be regarded as a cyclopaedia of all that was known of medicine at that time (as well as collateral sciences). This was a compilation from Greek writers, whose writings had been translated into Arabic, (for Avicenna was not a Greek scholar himself). Avenzoar, and Averrhoes flourished in the twelfth century. The last was a celebrated philosopher as well as physician. The works of Hippocrates and Galen, which, together with the works of Aristotle, Plato and Euclid, were translated into Arabic in the ninth century, formed the basis of their medical knowledge; but the Arabian physicians did good service to medicine, introducing new articles from the East into European materia medica, as for example, rhubarb, cassia, senna, camphor, and in making known what may be termed the first elements of pharmaceutical chemistry, such as a knowledge of distillation, and of the means of obtaining various metallic oxides and salts. Upon the decline of the Saracenic universities in Spain, which was about the time of the death of Averrhoes, the only medical knowledge that remained was to be found in Italy, where the School of Salerno acquired considerable celebrity, which it maintained for some time, till it was gradually eclipsed by the rising fame of other medical schools at Bologna—where Mondino or Mundinus de Leozza publicly dissected two human bodies in 1315. Contemporary with Mondini, lived Gilbert, the first English writer on medicine who acquired any repute; and the next century gave birth to Linacre, who after studying at Oxford spent a considerable time at Bologna, Florence, Rome, Venice and Padua, and subsequently became the founder of the London College of Physicians. It was in this fifteenth century that the sect of chemical physicians arose, who claimed that all the phenomena of the living body could be explained by the same chemical laws as those that rule inorganic matters. Although the illustrations and proofs which they adduced were completely unsatisfactory, yet the tendency at the present time is in the same direction, since chemistry and physiology are better known.