Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1886 — Literary Catacombs. [ARTICLE]

Literary Catacombs.

“Shall our civilization be preserved ?” is a question often suggested by Prof. Vambery’s essays on the literature of the medimval Moslems. Their leading races were Semites, but “what lacked those knaves” that a royal Caucasian should have? Certainly not progressiveness nor aptitude for natural science. - The favorite sciences of the ancients were little more than dialectics, but the nations who produced the idyls of the Gulistan and the epics of ,the Shah Nahmeh showed an equal genius, for chemistry, medicine, astronomy, natural history, and the higher mathematics. It is surprising, and, indeed, not a little humiliating, to compare the status of Moslem science in the second century of the Hegira with the con temporary state of affairs in Christian Europe. At a time when the literature., of our baptized forefathers was limited to a few dozen chronicles of imaginary martyrs and paladins, and when, aS Hallam assures us, it was difficult, even in Rome, to find a priest who could read his own breviary, a mere index of Moslem authors would have filled a considerable catalogue. They iiad text-books of all abstract and concrete sciences; they had astronomical tables, maps, globes, and sea-charts; they had universities and agricultural colleges, model farms, parklike gardens, and magnificent, well-lighted cities. Why, then, did their civilization so utterly perish? Was it their physical inferiority to the thick-headed Goths ? Was it polygamy ? Did they underrate the importance of physical education at a time when personal liberty depended on personal prowess? Or should Herr Weil be right that the chief cause of their ruin wks an excess of geographical diffusion ? “They attempted too much,” says the historian of the caliphs ; “they spread themselves over a teri itory too large and too disjointed to resist the attacks of a concentrated toe.—Prof. Felix L. Oswald. - __