iology,
pathology and hygiene, the third and fourth deal with the methods of
treating disease, and the fifth describes the composition and preparation
of remedies. This last part contains some contingent of personal
observation. He is, like all his countrymen, ample in the enumeration of
symptoms, and is said to be inferior to Ali in practical medicine and
surgery. He introduced into medical theory the four causes of the
Peripatetic system. Of natural history and botany he pretends to no special
knowledge. Up to the year 1650, or thereabouts, the _Canon_ was still used
as a text-book in the universities of Louvain and Montpellier.

About 100 treatises are ascribed to Avicenna. Some of them are tracts of a
few pages, others are works extending through several volumes. The
best-known amongst them, and that to which Avicenna owed his European
reputation, is the _Canon of Medicine_; an Arabic edition of it appeared at
Rome in 1593, and a Hebrew version at Naples in 1491. Of the Latin version
there were about thirty editions, founded on the original translation by
Gerard of Cremona. The 15th century has the honour of composing the great
commentary on the text of the _Canon_, grouping around it all that theory
had imagined, and all that practice had observed. Other medical works
translated into Latin are the _Medicamenta Cordialia_, _Canticum de
Medicina_, _Tractatus de Syrupo Acetoso_. Scarcely any member of the
Arabian circle of the sciences, including theology, philology, mathematics,
astronomy, physics and music, was left untouched by the treatises of
Avicenna, many of which probably varied little, except in being
commissioned by a different patron and having a different form or extent.
He wrote at least one treatise on alchemy, but several others have been
falsely attributed to him. His book on animals was translated by Michael
Scot. His _Logic_, _Metaphysics_, _Physics_, _De Caelo_, are treatises
giving a synoptic view of Aristotelian doctrine. The _Logic_ and
_Metaphysics_ have been printed more than once, the latter, _e.g._, at
Venice in 1493, 1495 and 1546. Some of his shorter essays on medicine,
logic, &c., take a poetical form (the poem on logic was published by
Schmoelders in 1836). Two encyclopaedic treatises, dealing with philosophy,
are often mentioned. The larger, _Al-Shif[=a]'_ (_Sanatio_), exists nearly
complete in manuscript in the Bodleian library and elsewhere; part of it on
the _De Anima_ appeared at Pavi