Such chemical learning as the Arabs had collected from Greek writers, as well as that which they had added from their own investigations, in this way found its way back to the heirs of the original owners as they may be called.
We read likewise of Constantine the African, who, about the year 1050, came to Salerno after a long residence in the East, and gave to the medical school of that city the translations he had made from Arab authors. But, notwithstanding these evidences of Eastern culture, it is certain that the actual introduction of pharmacy into the Northern European countries is much more largely due to the Spanish Mohammedans. In the Middle Ages poor Arabs and Jews who had studied medicine in the schools of Cordova and Seville tramped through France and Germany, selling their remedies, and teaching many things to the monks and priests who, in spite of repeated papal edicts forbidding them to sell medicines, did in fact cultivate all branches of the art of healing, including many superstitions. The edicts themselves are evidence that they sold their services to those who could afford to pay for them.
The Medical School of Salerno, already mentioned, was the principal link between the later Greek physicians and the teaching institutions which remain with us to this day, as, for instance, the universities of Paris, Naples, Oxford, Padua, Vienna, and others of later fame. The origin of the school of Salerno is unknown, but it was certainly in existence in the ninth century. It was long supposed to have developed from a monastic institution, but it is now generally believed to have been always a secular school. Its historian, Mazza of Naples, 1681, quotes an ancient chronicle which names Rabbi Elinus (a Jew), Pontus (a Greek),
