every degree, from the son of the noble to that of the mechanic; a sufficient allowance was provided for the indigent scholars, and the merit or industry of the professors was repaid with adequate stipends. In every city the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich."
And, as an evidence of Moslem viewpoint as to the value of learning, mark the words of Caliph Al-Mamun who declared that "they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties; that the teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of this world, which, without their aid, would again sink into ignorance and barbarism."
Learning then became the rule. From India the Arabs brought the present numeral system. Algebra was developed from the early beginnings laid down by Diophantus. We owe the solution of quadratic equations as well as cubic equations to Mahomet Ben Musa and Omar Ben Ibrahim respectively. Under the Saracens trigonometry grew to its present form. It was through the Arabs that the people of Europe learned to play chess, and their romances gave a trend to our present day literature. Our ideas of evolution were not the first. (See appendix.) The Arabs were taught something of the kind by Al-Khazini. As for astronomy, the names given to the celestial bodies by them those that we use today. They had calculated the size of the earth, determined the
