number of literary anecdotes of philosophers, physicians, &c., who
have flourished under each caliph, form the principal merit of the
Dynasties of Abulpharagius.]

[Footnote 54: These literary anecdotes are borrowed from the Bibliotheca
Arabico-Hispana, (tom. ii. p. 38, 71, 201, 202,) Leo Africanus, (de
Arab. Medicis et Philosophis, in Fabric. Bibliot. Graec. tom. xiii. p.
259-293, particularly p. 274,) and Renaudot, (Hist. Patriarch. Alex.
p. 274, 275, 536, 537,) besides the chronological remarks of
Abulpharagius.]

In the libraries of the Arabians, as in those of Europe, the far greater
part of the innumerable volumes were possessed only of local value or
imaginary merit. [55] The shelves were crowded with orators and poets,
whose style was adapted to the taste and manners of their countrymen;
with general and partial histories, which each revolving generation
supplied with a new harvest of persons and events; with codes and
commentaries of jurisprudence, which derived their authority from the
law of the prophet; with the interpreters of the Koran, and orthodox
tradition; and with the whole theological tribe, polemics, mystics,
scholastics, and moralists, the first or the last of writers, according
to the different estimates of sceptics or believers. The works of
speculation or science may be reduced to the four classes of philosophy,
mathematics, astronomy, and physic. The sages of Greece were translated
and illustrated in the Arabic language, and some treatises, now lost
in the original, have been recovered in the versions of the East, [56]
which possessed and studied the writings of Aristotle and Plato, of
Euclid and Apollonius, of Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen. [57] Among
the ideal systems which have varied with the fashion of the times, the
Arabians adopted the philosophy of the Stagirite, alike intelligible
or alike obscure for the readers of every age. Plato wrote for the
Athenians, and his allegorical genius is too closely blended with the
language and religion of Greece. After the fall of that religion,
the Peripatetics, emerging from their obscurity, prevailed in the
controversies of the Oriental sects, and their founder was long
afterwards restored by the Mahometans of Spain to the Latin schools.
[58] The physics, both of the Academy and the Lycaeum, as they are
built, not on observation, but on argument, have retarded the progress
of real knowledge. The metaphysics of infinite, or finite, spirit, have