• A little before the middle of the seventh century, the Arabs, who were then a fierce and uncivilized people, overran Egypt and Persia. Posterity must ever lament the ravages they committed. The famous library of Alexandria, which contained the accumulated labours of ages, and was almost the sole repository of the ge nius, the arts, and the learning of antiquity, fell a prey to their fanaticism, and was consigned without mercy to the flames. (See ALEXANDRIA.) By a revolution, however, not uncommon in human affairs, the manners of the Arabs, soon after this irretrievable event, became totally changed : Grmcia capta ferum victorem mph, et artes Math agresti Latio.
A century had scarcely elapsed, before they began to cultivate, with ardour, those very sciences which lately they endeavoured to banish from the, face of the earth. The sages of Greece were translated into the Arabic, and some treatises now lost in the original, have been recovered in the versions of that language. The writ ings of Aristotle and Plato, of Euclid and Apollonius, were studied and illustrated ; and though the original discoveries of the Arabs themselves are few and unim portant, those of happier times have, at least, been pre served by them from oblivion, and that too at a period when every other nation was plunged in the deepest ig norance.
Though the conquest of a country by a foreign inva der too often brings desolation and misery in its train, it sometimes communicates the benefits of improvement for the glory of independence. When the Arabs, about the beginning of the eighth century, established them selves in the southerly provinces of Spain, they carried the arts and sciences along with thew; and the intro duction of the decimal form of notation into Europe, was one memorable advantage which flowed from that event. The Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans, long before this period, had distributed numbers into classes of tens, but without any view of simplifying the methods of calculation. They never thought of distin guishing the value of the characters of number by the relative places which they occupied ; and for that rea son, their notation was exceedingly complex, and their calculations were tedious and fatiguing. The Arabs, on the other hand, expressed numbers by peculiar and ap propriate signs, and caused the same figure to possess a different value according to its place, but always with a reference to its original or simple value. This me
thod, which is now used by every civilized nation, has all the precision we can desire, with the important ad vantages of conciseness and simplicity. It is impossi ble, indeed, for human ingenuity to contrive any thing better adapted to the purposes of calculation; a more convenient scale than the decimal might be substituted, but the principles of the notation itself are incapable of improvement.
The celebrated Gerbert, who was afterwards raised to. the pontifical chair under the name of Silvester II., con tributed greatly, by his zeal for learning, to diffuse the knowledge of the. Arabian arithmetic throughout Eu rope. He obtained the permission of his order to go to Spain, for the purpose of instructing himself in the learning of that country, which at that time possessed two schools of great reputation, one at Cordova, and the other at Granada. When he returned to France, he published all the information he had collected concern ing the Arabian arithmetic, and brought it into general use among his countrymen about the year 970. It must have been introduced into Britain soon after; at least, it was known here before the close of the eleventh cen tury, as appears by an inscription on the window of a house in Colchester, forming part of a Roman wall, and which bears the date of 1090.
We ought to have mentioned, however, that before this period, arithmetic had made considerable progress in England under the old notation. The "venerable Bede," whose labours were as various as they are ex cellent, if we consider the times in which he lived, con ferred a degree of lustre on the eighth century, and was indeed an ornament to his country. He corrected the calendar; and, at his suggestion, the practice of reckon ing the date of events from the birth of our Saviour was first adopted in England. He wrote two treatises on arithmetic, one entitled, De Numeris; the other De Di visione Numerorum. The latter is particularly valuable, as it spews the complicated methods which they were forced to have recourse to in the operation of division, before the introduction of the Arabian notation. Alcuin, who was a disciple of Bede, and became afterwards the preceptor of Charlemagne, also wrote on arithmetic.