Had the progress of the sciences among the Arabians been proportional to the number of those who cultivated them, we might hail the Saracens as the saviours of literature during the dark and benighted ages of Christianity; but we must acknowledge with regret, that notwithstanding the enlightened views of the califs, notwithstanding the multiplicity of academies and libraries, and the prodigious number of writers, the sciences received but little improvement from the Arabians. There are very few Arabian writers in whose works we find either philosophical ideas, successful researches, new facts, or great and new and important truths. How, indeed, could such things be expected from a people naturally hostile to mental exertion; professing a religion which stigmatizes all exercise of the judgment as a crime, and weighed down by the heavy yoke of despotism? It was the religion of the Arabians, and the despotism of their princes, that opposed the greatest obstacles to the progress of the sciences, even during the most flourishing period of their civilization.[103] Fortunately chemistry was the branch of science least obnoxious to the religious prejudices of the Mahometans. It was in it, therefore, that the greatest improvements were made: of these improvements it will be requisite now to endeavour to give the reader some idea. Astrology and alchymy, they both derived from the Greeks: neither of them were inconsistent with the taste of the nation--neither of them were anathematized by the Mahometan creed, though Islamism prohibited magic and all the arts of divination. Alchymy may have suggested the chemical processes--but the Arabians applied them to the preparation of medicines, and thus opened a new and most copious source of investigation. [103] For a fuller account of the progress of science among the Arabians than would be consistent with this work, the reader is referred to Mortucla’s Hist. des Mathématiques, i. 351; Sprengel’s Hist. de la Médecine, ii. 246. The chemical writings of the Arabians which I have had an opportunity of seeing and perusing in a Latin dress, being ignorant of the original language in which they were written, are those of Geber and Avicenna.