and the two subordinate bodies, composed respectively of fifty and seventy disciples, were charged with the management of affairs of inferior moment; the result of their deliberations being subject to the approval or rejection of the Mahdi himself. The revolutionists, whose numbers, daily recruited by accessions from the martial tribes of the Desert, had now become formidable, assumed the name of Almohades, or Unitarians, not only to distinguish them from the Christians, whose trinitarian dogma and adoration of images caused them to be designated by all Moslems as idolaters, but to indicate as well a return to the original simplicity of Islam, long corrupted by the heterodox practices and dissolute manners of their Almoravide rivals. A strange and mysterious fatality seemed to attach to the fortunes of the latter in every field where they encountered the armies of the newly arisen Prophet. In four successive engagements the soldiers of Ali, seized with a panic in the presence of the enemy, yielded almost without resistance to the attack of the Berber cavalry; their standards and baggage were taken, and thousands of fugitives, butchered in headlong flight, expiated with the loss of life and honor their effeminacy and their cowardice. The opinion generally prevalent in the minds of the illiterate, that military success is an infallible criterion of religious truth, began to produce its effect on the Almoravides. The terror experienced by them at the sight of the enemy--really due to relaxation of discipline and apprehension of the miraculous powers of an audacious charlatan--was universally attributed to supernatural influence. The mission of the Mahdi required no further demonstration of its divine origin. Henceforth his utterances were received by both friend and enemy as the oracles of God. His credit daily increased among the credulous and passionate inhabitants of the Desert. The Almoravide soldiers shrank from an encounter with a foe whose white standard seemed to be invested with the mystic qualities of a talisman. The Mahdi, renouncing in a measure his character of affected humility, now assumed the pomp of a sovereign. He surrounded himself with a splendidly appointed bodyguard. His throne was approached by suppliants for favor with the debasing and complicated ceremonial of Oriental despotism. He demanded, in arrogant and menacing language, submission and tribute from Ali, who, dejected by repeated misfortune, began to share with his ignorant subjects the awe which enveloped the person and the attributes of his triumphant and formidable adversary. The plans of the latter had heretofore been accomplished without an established base of operations, the camps of the Almohades being moved from place to place over the drifting sands of the Desert; but now, the direction of an army of twenty thousand men, the subsistence and shelter of a vast multitude of non-combatants, and the dignity and