ABSTRACT
The astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatised in Greek culture. The Greeks systematised, generalised and theorised, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation, experimental inquiry, were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Christian Europe had little to learn in the way of dogmatism; and those theories, such as the Ptolemaic system, the geographical doctrine of ‘climates,’ the doctrine of alchemical transmutation, which it received from the Arabs, were not Arabic, but Greek. Ancient science of the Greeks had itself been originally derived from the Babylonians, migrants from Arabia to Mesopotamia, like the Arabs. Thus that ancient science which the latter restored to Europe was itself the achievement of their own ancient cousins from whom the Greeks had once borrowed it.
