, except it be a bad woman."

[Sidenote: The Arabs affiliate with them.]

[Sidenote: Rise of Jewish physicians to influence.]

[Sidenote: They found medical colleges,]

[Sidenote: and promote science and literature.]

At first, after the fall of the Alexandrian school, it was all that the
Jewish physicians could do to preserve the learning that had descended
to them. But when the tumult of Arabic conquest was over, we find them
becoming the advisers of crowned heads, and exerting, by reason of their
advantageous position, their liberal education, their enlarged views, a
most important influence on the intellectual progress of humanity. Maser
Djaivah, physician to the Khalif Moawiyah, was distinguished at once as
a poet, a critic, a philosopher; Haroun, a physician of Alexandria,
whose Pandects, a treatise unfortunately now lost, are said to have
contained the first elaborate description of the small-pox and method of
its treatment. Isaac Ben Emran wrote an original treatise on poisons
and their symptoms, and others followed his example. The Khalif Al
Raschid, who maintained political relations with Charlemagne by means of
Jewish envoys, set that monarch an example by which indeed he was not
slow to profit, in actively patronising the medical college at
Djondesabour, and founding a university at Bagdad. He prohibited any
person from practising medicine until after a satisfactory examination
before one of those faculties. In the East the theological theory of
disease and of its cure was fast passing away. Of the school at Bagdad,
Joshua ben Nun is said to have been the most celebrated professor, the
school itself actively promoting the translation of Greek works into
Arabic--not alone works of a professional, but also those of a general
kind. In this manner the writings of Plato and Aristotle were secured;
indeed, it is said that almost every day camels laden with volumes were
entering the gates of Bagdad. To add to the supply, the Emperor Michael
III. was compelled by treaty to furnish Greek books. The result of this
intellectual movement could be no other than a diffusion of light.
Schools arose in Bassora, Ispahan, Samarcand, Fez, Morocco, Sicily,
Cordova, Seville, Granada.

[Sidenote: Intermingling of magic and sorcery.]

[Sidenote: Dedication of portions of matter and time to the
supernatural.]

[Sidenote: Origin of the week.]

Through the Nestorians and the Jews the Arabs thus became acquainted
with the m