is the strange inconsistency of human nature--the Maadites became voluntary dependents of the kings of Yemen and Hira. In an age of remote antiquity, the Himyarite dialect spoken in the South had been supplanted by the more polished idiom of the Hedjaz. The intensity and duration of the hatred existing between Maadite and Yemenite are inconceivable by the mind of one of Caucasian blood, and are without precedent, even in the East. It affected the policy of nations; it determined the fate of empires; it menaced the stability of long-established articles of faith; it invaded the family, corrupting the instincts of filial reverence, and betraying the sacred confidences of domestic life. Upon pretexts so frivolous as hardly to justify a quarrel between individuals, nations were plunged into all the calamities of civil war. A difference affecting the construction of a point of religious discipline was sufficient to assemble a horde of fanatics, and devote whole provinces to devastation and massacre. A petty act of trespass--the detaching of a vine-leaf, the theft of a melon--provoked the most cruel retaliation upon the community to which the culprit belonged. The Maadite, inheriting the haughty spirit of the Bedouin marauder, despised his ancestors if there was in their veins a single drop of the blood of Kahtan; and, on the other hand, under corresponding conditions of relationship, the Yemenite refused to pray even for his mother if she was allied to the Maadites, whom he stigmatized as a race of barbarians and slaves. And yet these were divisions of the same people; with similar tastes and manners; identical in dress and personal aspect; speaking the same tongue; worshipping at the same altars; fighting under the same banners; frequently united by intermarriage; actuated by the same ambitions; zealous for the attainment of the same ends. The investigation of this anomaly, an ethnical peculiarity so remarkable in its tenacity of prejudice, and which, enduring for more than twenty-five hundred years, the most powerful motives and aspirations of the mind have failed to abrogate, presents one of the most interesting problems in the history of humanity.