Avicenna was born in the year 978, at Bokhara, to which place his father had retired during the emirate of the calif Nuhh, one of the sons of the celebrated Almansor. Ali, his father, had dwelt in Balkh, in the Chorazan. After the birth of Avicenna he went to Asschena in Bucharia, where he continued to live till his son had reached his fifteenth year. No labour nor expense was spared on the education of Avicenna, whose abilities were so extraordinary that he is said to have been able to repeat the whole Koran by heart at the age of ten years. Ali gave him for a master Abou-Abdallah-Annatholi, who taught him grammar, dialectics, the geometry of Euclid, and the astronomy of Ptolemy. But Avicenna quitted his tuition because he could not give him the solution of a problem in logic. He attached himself to a merchant, who taught him arithmetic, and made him acquainted with the Indian numerals from which our own are derived. He then undertook a journey to Bagdad, where he studied philosophy under the great Peripatician, Abou-Nasr-Alfarabi, a disciple of Mesue the elder. At the same time he applied himself to medicine, under the tuition of the Nestorian, Abou-Sahel-Masichi. He informs us himself that he applied with an extraordinary ardour to the study of the sciences. He was in the habit of drinking great quantities of liquids during the night, to prevent him from sleeping; and he often obtained in a dream a solution of those problems at which he had laboured in vain while he was awake. When the difficulties to be surmounted appeared to him too great, he prayed to God to communicate to him a share of his wisdom; and these prayers, he assures us, were never offered in vain. The metaphysics of Aristotle was the only book which he could not comprehend, and after reading them over forty times, he threw them aside with great anger at himself. Already, at the age of sixteen, he was a physician of eminence; and at eighteen he performed a brilliant cure on the calif Nuhh, which gave him such celebrity that Mohammed, Calif of Chorazan, invited him to his palace; but Avicenna rather chose to reside at Dschordschan, where he cured the nephew of the calif Kabus of a grievous distemper.