Arim in the middle, with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, and the
north and south poles at equal distance from it--the centre and the four
corners of the world as neatly fixed as geometry could define--this was
the map, first of the Arabs, and then of their Christian scholars.

To form any idea of the complete spell thus cast over thought both in
Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after
its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian
scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of
Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic
geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in the twelfth century, Roger Bacon
and Albertus Magnus in the later thirteenth, are all as clear about
their geographical postulates as about their theological or ethical
rules. And what concerns us here is that they exactly reflect the mind
of the Arabic science or pseudo-science of the time just preceding, so
that their words may represent to us the state of Mohammedan thought
between the eighth and twelfth centuries, between the writers at the
Court of Caliph Almamoun (813-833) and Edrisi at the Court of King Roger
of Sicily (1150).

(1.) _Adelard_, summarising Mohammed Al-Kharizmy with the results of his
Paris education, tells us of the Arabic "Examination of planets and of
time, starting from the centre of the world, called _Arim_, from which
place to the four ends of the earth the distance is equal, viz., ninety
degrees, answering to the fourth part of the world's circumference. It
is tedious and unending to attempt to place all the countries of the
world and to fix all the marks of time. So the meridian is taken as the
measure of the latter and _Arim_ of the former, and from this
starting-point it is not hard to fix other countries." "Arim," he