the high estimation in which they were held by the Arabs. The latter, with their numerous shrines, their swarms of deities, their elaborate paraphernalia of worship and imposture, were, however, far from being a religious people. They evinced a decided aversion to metaphysics. Their ideas of personal liberty were not consistent with unquestioning submission to the tyranny of a priesthood. Their native intelligence rendered them. skeptical; their nomadic habits were unfavorable to the maintenance of a permanent ecclesiastical establishment. The multiplicity of deities had, as is invariably the case, weakened the faith of the masses in any. The genuine piety of a people is always in an inverse ratio to the number of its gods. The early Arabians practised magic and divination, had recourse to oracles, maintained wizards and sorcerers--charlatans whose ascendency was largely due to the narcotics they made use of to open a pretended communication with the spirit world. Amulets were universally worn as a protection against the baneful consequences of the evil eye. Hand in hand with presages and magical arts, auguries, and incantations, came the incipient doctrine of the influence of the planets upon mineral substances, as well as a belief in their power to affect the destiny and welfare of man; theories which, eventually developing into the vain pursuits of alchemy and judicial astrology, indicate an acquaintance with the principles of science only acquired by much study and repeated experiments. The practice of these rites, so severely reprobated in the Koran, was associated in the minds of the people with the ceremonies of public worship during the age of polytheism. The words altar and talisman are practically synonymous in Arabic, a fact which discloses the intimate alliance originally existing between divination, sorcery, and religion in the Peninsula. Human sacrifices, so repugnant to all our ideas of piety and justice, but common to nations of Semitic origin, were of frequent occurrence among the Arabs before Mohammed. The mode of death was by fire, which removed every earthly impurity; but it was only in the fulfilment of a solemn vow, on an occasion of national rejoicing, or to avert some impending calamity, that such a costly expiation was exacted. The Israelites, allied to the Arabs by the ties of consanguinity, and by similar religious conceptions, had also long been familiar with these revolting and cruel rites; instances of whose observance will at once suggest themselves to all who are familiar with the Pentateuch.