e Victor
constantly stimulated Constantine, even from distant Rome, to go on with
his work. There were messages of brotherly interest and solicitude just
as in the old days. The great African physician's best known work, the
so-called "Liber Pantegni," which is really a translation of the
"Khitaab el Maleki" of Ali Ben el-Abbas, is dedicated to Desiderius.
Constantine wrote a number of other books, most of them original, but it
is difficult now to decide just which of those that pass under his name
are genuine. Many were subsequently attributed to him that are surely
not his.

These translators of the Middle Ages proved to be not only the channels
through which information came to their generations, but they were also
incentives to study and investigation. It is when men can get a certain
amount of information rather easily that they are tempted to seek
further in order to solve the problems that present themselves. There
are three great translators whose work meant much for the Middle Ages at
this time. They were, besides Constantine in the eleventh century,
Gerard of Cremona, in the twelfth, and the Jewish Faradj Ben Salim, at
Naples, in the thirteenth. Gerard did in Spain for the greater Arabian
writers what Constantine had accomplished for those of lesser import.
Under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he published
translations of Rhazes, Isaac Judaeus, Serapion, Abulcasis, and Avicenna.
His work was done in Toledo, the city in which, during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, so many translators were at work making books for
the Western world.

Constantine did much more than merely bring out his translations of
Arabian works. He gave a zest to the study of the old masters, issued
editions of certain, at least, of the works of Hippocrates ("Aphorisms")
and Galen ("Microtechnics"), and, in general, called attention to the
precious treasure of medical lore that must be used to advantage if men
were to teach the rising generation out of the accumulated knowledge of
the past. Pagel, in Puschmann's "Handbook," does not hesitate to say
that "a farther merit of Constantine must be recognized, inasmuch as
that not long after his career the second epoch of the school of Salerno
begins, marked not only by a wealth of writers and writings on medicine,
but, above all, because from this time on the study of Greek medicine
received renewed encouragement through the Latin versions of the Arabian
literature. We