easily acquired that it was spoken by young children with grammatical correctness and fluency, he justly boasted as one of the most perfect idioms ever invented by man. In short, the Arab regarded himself as the highest exemplar of humanity; his arrogance revolted at the idea of matrimonial connections with races which he deemed inferior to his own; and the pre-eminence he claimed for himself and his countrymen was indicated by the prerogatives which he asserted Allah had vouchsafed to them alone of all nations; “that their turbans should be their diadems, their tents their houses, their swords their intrenchments, and their poems their laws.” The pre-Islamitic religion of the Arabs was mainly a debasing idolatry polluted by human sacrifices, and ascending, by ill-defined gradations, from the lowest forms of fetichism to the adoration of the stars. Their faith was far from uniform, and almost every tribe had special objects of veneration and peculiar modes of worship. Some were absolutely destitute of the idea of a God; some grovelled before roughly-hewn blocks of stone; others worshipped trees and springs,--the most grateful gifts of nature in a parched and thirsty land; others, again, greeted with praise the rising sun as its beams illuminated the purple mists of the Desert, or bowed reverently at night before the glittering majesty of the heavens. The members of certain tribes were materialists; not a few accepted the metempsychosis; many were familiar with the philosophical creed of the Buddhist, which regarded death as the irrevocable end of all spiritual activity, the beginning of a state of absolute quiescence, of eternal and immutable rest. The majority of the Arab races, however, looked upon their idols as mediators between the Supreme Being and man. Hence they erected temples in their honor, named their children for them, made pilgrimages to their shrines, and solicited their good offices with precious gifts and offerings. The heavenly bodies were placed in the same category. Their intercession with the Deity was also invoked by frequent applications; and to their power, thus indirectly exercised, were attributed the most important as well as the most trivial occurrences of life, the benefits of fortune, the infliction of calamities, the mysterious and terrifying effects of natural phenomena. It is a superstition as old as the human race to imagine the universe to be peopled with mysterious beings, and the lives of men to be moulded by the beneficent or malignant influence of the stars. The worship of the Sun, the genial dispenser of light, of warmth, of health, in whose train follow the increase of flocks, the bursting of buds, the welcome sight of refreshing verdure, the author of all that is useful and attractive in every species of organic life, a worship which in ages of primeval simplicity has always most strongly appealed to the gratitude and veneration of man, was highly popular in Pagan Arabia. Classic historians have