the only mark which distinguished its rule from that of the orthodox Khalif at Baghdad seems to have been that the _khutba_ before the Friday sermon was said in the name of the Fatimid, and that of the ʿAbbasid was not mentioned. The whole sectarian teaching seems to have evaporated steadily in an Egyptian atmosphere which was one of steady indifference. The philosophical teaching which had been the first object of the sect, died away in Asia, and was then transmitted to Spain which formed a kind of _orbis ulterior_ of Islam, leaping over Egypt altogether, as though its premature development in the Ismaʿilian sect had inoculated the Fatimite community against it. The characteristically Persian doctrines of incarnation and transmigration took no hold in Egypt or Ilfrikiya: when they were vigorously preached by Persians in Hakim’s time they only provoked a riot. We can hardly treat religion as a matter of race, for there seems no good evidence for extending heredity so as to include matters of cultural development: culture, which includes religion, is transmitted by contact not by descent, it is learned not inherited: and it is very doubtful how far psychological pre-dispositions can be inherited. But culture exists in different areas with distinctive characteristics so that it is not easy for persons of one culture-area to appreciate the outlook of those of another, although there is a constant culture-drift passing between the two. In North Africa there is a tendency to pay exaggerated honour, which might be described as actual worship, to the _murabits_ or saints, but it is quite independent of the incarnation theories which prevail in Persia and India, and so we may say that this, the characteristic tenet of the Ismaʿilis as Shiʿites, found itself in Egypt and North Africa in an unsympathetic atmosphere, and was gradually starved out. Perhaps we may take the accession of al-Hafiz in A.H. 524 = A.D. 1131, when the wazir in office was antagonistic to the Ismaʿili doctrines, as the probable date by which the doctrines of the Ismaʿili sect had ceased to have any meaning in Egypt, and consequently that in which the parent Ismaʿili sect was practically obsolete. Whatever may have been the sincerity of its first founders, of those whom we credit with a desire to spread the philosophical theories learned from Greek philosophers and formed into a body of doctrine subversive of the traditional teaching of Islam, or of those who were attached to the incarnation theories of the Persians, it is clear that the purely political element finally gained the upper hand, and in due time discarded all the religious and philosophical thought which, from their point of view, had outlived its utility. In Fatimid Egypt the sect was rather like a free-masonry under royal patronage, and when this patronage came to an end the sect died a natural death. That the teaching of Duruzi and Hamza in the reign of Hakim met with such violent opposition is convincing that Shiʿite