It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science prospered as they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science; women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study; and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history[?], philosophy and jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors." See Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Moors in Spain_, pref. It could be wished that Mr. Lane-Poole had given English readers, as he so well could, a study of Saracen civilisation, instead of a "Story of the Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the passage see Dozy, _Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109, 110; Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp. 186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, _Intellectual Development of Europe_, ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, _Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp. Seignobos, _Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age_, 3e éd. pp. 48-62; Gebhart, _Origines de la Renaissance en Italie_, 1879, pp. 185-89; Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, 2nd ed. pp. 217, 286; Nöldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as cited, i, 3; Baden-Powell, _History of Natural Philosophy_, 1834, pp. 94-104; U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.