Beautiful as were the palaces and gardens of Cordova, her claims to admiration in higher matters were no less strong. The mind was as lovely as the body. Her professors and teachers made her the centre of European culture; students would come from all parts of Europe to study under her famous doctors, and even the nun Hroswitha, far away in her Saxon convent of Gaudersheim, when she told of the martyrdom of St. Eulogius, could not refrain from singing the praises of Cordova, "the brightest splendour of the world." Every branch of science was seriously studied there, and medicine received more and greater additions by the discoveries of the doctors and surgeons of Andalusia than it had gained during all the centuries that had elapsed since the days of Galen. Albucasis (or Abu-l-Kāsim Khalaf, to give him his proper name) was a notable surgeon of the eleventh century, and some of his operations coincided with the present practice. Avenzoar (Ibn Zohr) a little later made numerous important medical and surgical discoveries. Ibn Beytar, the botanist, travelled all over the East to find medicinal herbs, on which he wrote an exhaustive treatise; and Averroes, the philosopher, formed the chief link in the chain which connects the philosophy of ancient Greece with that of mediæval Europe. Astronomy, geography, chemistry, natural history--all were studied with ardour at Cordova; and as for the graces of literature, there never was a time in Europe when poetry became so much the speech of everybody, when people of all ranks composed those Arabic verses which perhaps suggested models for the ballads and canzonettes of the Spanish minstrels and the troubadours of Provence and Italy. No speech or address was complete without some scrap of verse, improvised on the spur of the moment by the speaker, or quoted by memory from some famous poet. The whole Moslem world seemed given over to the Muses; Khalifs and boatmen turned verses, and sang of the loveliness of the cities of Andalusia, the murmur of her rivers, the beautiful nights beneath her tranquil stars, and the delights of love and wine, of jovial company and stolen meetings with the lady whose curving eyebrows had bewitched the singer.