A second element of beauty is found in the lexical richness of the Arabic. Its boundless vocabulary and wealth of synonyms are universally acknowledged and admired. A dictionary is called a _Kamoos_ or “Deep Ocean” where “full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark unfathomed caves” conceal for the diligent student. Renan tells of an Arab linguist who wrote a book on the 500 names given to the lion in literature; another gives 200 words for serpent. Firozabadi, the Arabian Webster, is said to have written a sort of supplement on the words for honey and to have left it incomplete at the _eightieth_ word; the same authority asserts that there are over 1,000 different terms in Arabic for sword and, judging from its use by the Arabs, this appears credible. De Hammer Purgstall, a German scholar, wrote a book on the words relating to the _camel_ and finds them, in Arabic literature, to the number of 5,744. But this remarkable exhibition loses some of its grandeur when truth compels us to state that many of the so-called synonyms are epithets changed into substantives or tropes accidentally employed by some poet to conform to his rhyme. It is also true that the wealth of synonym is limited in Arabic to a certain class of words; in other departments of thought, ethics for example, the language is wofully poor, not even having a distinctive word for conscience. A third point of beauty in the Arabic language is its purity as compared with other Semitic languages or even all other languages. This was partly due to the geographical location of the Arabs and is still due to their early literature together with the Koran which has put a classical standard into the hands of every schoolboy and has prevented, by the law of religion, both development and deterioration. “While other languages of the same family became dead and while many of their forms and meanings changed or disappeared, the Arabic remained comparatively pure and intact excepting perhaps the temporary corruption which necessarily occurred during the Moslem conquests and foreign applications of the first four Caliphs.”[88] The Arabic race occupied at first a circumscribed territory and came little into contact with the surrounding nations so that the forces which produce linguistic decay were absent. The only thing that will preserve a language pure next to isolation is a classical literature. English has changed less since Shakespeare’s time than it did in the interval between him and Chaucer. So too with Arabic. Had it not been for the Koran and its cognate literature, by this time the people of Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Oman would perhaps scarcely understand each other, and their written language would differ vastly; but the existence of this literature has kept the written language a unit and put a constant check on the vagaries of dialect.