their alembics, cucurbites, and pelicans, maintaining their fires for so
many years that salamanders are asserted to be born in them.

Experimental science was thus restored, though under a very strange
aspect, by the Arabians. Already it displayed its connexion with
medicine--a connexion derived from the influence of the Nestorians and
the Jews. It is necessary for us to consider briefly the relations of
each, and of the Nestorians first.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]

[Sidenote: They deny the virginity of the queen of heaven.]

[Sidenote: They begin to cultivate medicine.]

[Sidenote: The Arabs affiliate with them.]

In Chapter IX. we have related the rivalries of Cyril, the Bishop of
Alexandria, and Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople. The theological
point of their quarrel was whether it is right to regard the Virgin Mary
as the mother of God. To an Egyptian still tainted with ancient
superstition, there was nothing shocking in such a doctrine. His was the
country of Isis. St. Cyril, who is to be looked upon as a mere
ecclesiastical demagogue, found his purposes answered by adopting it
without any scruple. But in Greece there still remained traces of the
old philosophy. A recollection of the ideas of Plato had not altogether
died out. There were some by whom it was not possible for the Egyptian
doctrine to be received. Such, perhaps, was Nestorius, whose sincerity
was finally approved by an endurance of persecutions, by his sufferings,
and his death. He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of
the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the
fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same Gospel,
could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity
of the new queen of heaven. We have described the issue of the Council
of Ephesus: the Egyptian faction gained the victory, the aid of court
females being called in, and Nestorius, being deposed from his office,
was driven, with his friends into exile. The philosophical tendency of
the vanquished was soon indicated by their actions. While their leader
was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the
Euphrates, and founded the Chaldaean Church. Under its auspices the
college at Edessa, with several connected schools, arose. In these were
translated into Syriac many Greek and Latin works, as those of Aristotle
and Pliny. It was the Nest