the struggles of rival princes for empire. They promoted and sustained the feuds of the nobility. They lurked under the tattered garments of the infuriated zealot. In the minds of the populace these feelings were scarcely ever concealed. They manifested themselves continually in personal quarrels, in the violence of mobs, in religious tumults, in insurrections, in the commission of frightful atrocities. They were potent factors in the destruction of mediæval Moslem civilization wherever established, and especially is this true of the Hispano-Arab domination, the most advanced, if not the most despotic, of them all. The temperament of the Arab, impetuous, fiery, vindictive, though admirably fitted for conquest, was deficient in those qualities of broad statesmanship and impartial discrimination vitally essential to the security and maintenance of government. Those who enjoyed the highest privileges of individual freedom were the mountaineers, who, in their inaccessible haunts, inured to privation, skilled in all manly exercises, and ignorant of luxury, clung with obstinate tenacity to their idols, and defied all attempts of the Prophet to convert or subdue them. Nor did Islam enlist her adherents in the purlieus of crowded cities. In Pagan as in Moslem Arabia, trade and religion were closely associated. The sympathies of the organized community were with the ancient religion, which contributed to its wealth, its employment, its personal profit, and its social distinction. The merchants and their numerous dependents looked coldly upon a revelation which menaced their revenues and their importance. The priesthood, recruited from the noblest families of the Peninsula, fostered this prejudice with an ardor born of instinctive hatred and professional pride. These two classes, therefore, contributed little to the propagation of the new doctrines; it was the wild hordes of the Desert that conquered the world. The Himyarite inscriptions, recently deciphered, have established the fact that, at an unknown epoch, two migratory populations, one proceeding from the North, the other from the South, came together in their course, and were so blended by association and intermarriage as to form, in a short time, a single people. This rapid fusion points to a common racial derivation, and it is not improbable that the northern division were the Canaanites expelled by the sword of Joshua.