The Arabs were learned, but not original. Their chief service to science consists in this, that they adopted the learning of Greece and India, and kept what they received with scrupulous care. When the love for science began to grow in the Occident, they transmitted to the Europeans the valuable treasures of antiquity. Thus a Semitic race was, during the Dark Ages, the custodian of the Aryan intellectual possessions.
EUROPE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.
With the third century after Christ begins an era of migration of nations in Europe. The powerful Goths quit their swamps and forests in the North and sweep onward in steady southwestern current, dislodging the Vandals, Sueves, and Burgundians, crossing the Roman territory, and stopping and recoiling only when reaching the shores of the Mediterranean. From the Ural Mountains wild hordes sweep down on the Danube. The Roman Empire falls to pieces, and the Dark Ages begin. But dark though they seem, they are the germinating season of the institutions and nations of modern Europe. The Teutonic element, partly pure, partly intermixed with the Celtic and Latin, produces that strong and luxuriant growth, the modern civilisation of Europe. Almost all the various nations of Europe belong to the Aryan stock. As the Greeks and the Hindoos—both Aryan races—were the great thinkers of antiquity, so the nations north of the Alps became the great intellectual leaders of modern times.
Introduction of Roman Mathematics.
We shall now consider how these as yet barbaric nations of the North gradually came in possession of the intellectual
