Machine summary:
Thus ic was that, helped by a far more wealthy and superior language, a superior and philosophical desert mind and other facilities, they produced unprecedented varieties of works on different sciences, and in the course of a shore time Alchemy, Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics and their various branches found way into their literature, and came to hold therein a position of some importance.
Likewise Medicine and its allied sciences of Botany and Natural History gradually crept into the intellectual orbit of the Arabs; but concerning them they were, to some extent, content with simply imitating what had been previously written on the subjects, though a small advance may be discerned in their works.
The contributions of these Muslims to the sciences with which we are here directly concerned-that of Zoology and· Natural History• had their origin in early philological and medical works.
It was at this period that the Muslim intelligentia produced the great philologists and grammarians who helped the evolution of Zoology and Natural History as special sciences, by naming and giving the classifications of the large number of animals known to the Arabs at that time, as also chose imported from foreign languages.
But, though for centuries, even before the advent of Islam, the Arabs - had closely observed the animals they had come into contact with their habits and the conditions under which they lived, no attempt had been made to compile and to reduce to writing the knowledge they had thus acquired.
who contributed largely towards the task of compiling in book-form all the knowledge of Natural History possessed by the Arabs at the time.