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Columbus was not its discoverer, for Fallopius speedily showed that Avicenna and Albucasis had referred to it. The Arabs appear to have been very familiar with it, and, from the various names they gave it, clearly understood the important part it plays in generating voluptuous emotion.
There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; of Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would; of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the Dervishes; and of many of less fame.
For while he passes in review all the ten categories showing that none of them is applicable to God, we scarcely find any mention of such important and fundamental Aristotelian conceptions as matter and form, potentiality and actuality, the four causes, formal, material, efficient and final concepts which as soon as Aristotle began to be studied by Al Farabi and Avicenna became familiar to all who wrote anything at all bearing on philosophy, theology, or Biblical exegesis.
And there is no reason why we should not accept the firmament, and the waters above the heaven, and the demons mentioned by the Rabbis, and the account of the days of the Messiah and the resurrection and the world to come. Another theory he criticizes is that developed by Alfarabi and Avicenna, the chief Aristotelians of the Arabs before Averroes.
"What should it be for," said the doctor to Gerard, "but to cauterize the vein when opened and the poisonous blood let free? 'Tis the only safe way. Avicenna indeed recommends a ligature of the vein; but how 'tis to be done he saith not, nor knew he himself I wot, nor any of the spawn of Ishmael.
However, the scientific world is at one in the belief that so far all attempts to prove it have failed utterly. St. Thomas Aquinas had a celebrated and sometimes misunderstood controversy with Avicenna, a very famous Arabian philosopher. It was a philosophical, but not strictly scientific, controversy, for both persons accepted or assumed the existence of spontaneous generation.
I took me another, to heal me for thee, And fate was propitious and grace did abound Yet I knew love a mortal disease, against which Avicenna his remedy idle I found.
Avicenna means that brimstone is hot and dry in the fourth degree, and is turned into kind of brimstone in part of water, of earth, and of fire, and that brimstone is sometimes great and boisterous and full of drausts, and sometimes pure white, clear and subtle, and sometimes mean between both. And by this diverse disposition, divers metals are gendered of brimstone and of quicksilver.
On account of his zeal for study Rhazes was known as the "Experimentator." The first of the Arabians, known throughout the Middle Ages as the Prince, the rival, indeed, of Galen, was the Persian Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, one of the greatest names in the history of medicine.
He does not mention the Virgin more than once or twice in the whole of the De Vita Propria; and, in discoursing on the immortality of the soul, he cites the opinion of Avicenna, but makes no mention of either saint or father.
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