6. It is this most primitive, material and unquestioning stage in the growth of religious feeling, which a large portion of the Shumiro-Accadian documents from the Royal Library at Nineveh brings before us with a force and completeness which, however much room there may still be for uncertainty in details, on the whole really amounts to more than conjecture. Much will, doubtless, be discovered yet, much will be done, but it will only serve to fill in a sketch, of which the outlines are already now tolerably fixed and authentic. The materials for this most important reconstruction are almost entirely contained in a vast collection of two hundred tablets, forming one consecutive work in three books, over fifty of which have been sifted out of the heap of rubbish at the British Museum and first deciphered by Sir Henry Rawlinson, one of the greatest, as he was the first discoverer in this field, and George Smith, whose achievements and too early death have been mentioned in a former chapter. Of the three books into which the collection is divided, one treats "of evil spirits," another of diseases, and the third contains hymns and prayers--the latter collection showing signs of a later and higher development. Out of these materials the lately deceased French scholar, Mr. Francois Lenormant, whose name has for the last fifteen years or so of his life stood in the very front of this branch of Oriental research, has been the first to reconstruct an entire picture in a book not very voluminous indeed, but which must always remain a corner-stone in the history of human culture. This book shall be our guide in the strange world we now enter.[AC]