their substance in folly and luxury, but they were particularly guilty of extravagance in killing camels, and distributing them by lot merely out of vanity and ostentation. Worse even than this, they were given to the destruction of their female children. Against this evil Mohammed sternly set his face. This in itself shows his great moral superiority over his countrymen. It shows also the possession of a higher and more refined yet practical intelligence, that was able to grasp the economic possibilities which were bound to ensue from the preservation of female children. Essentially an Arab patriarch at heart (which he in some measure proved by his marriages), Mohammed, however, was still more essentially a Humanist. With the moral greatness of a good man, and the mental perception of genius, he felt and recognized that it was against all the laws of God to destroy the fecundity of and the productive in nature. Thus it was that he placed the divine tabu on the abuse and destruction of all that was beneficial to humanity, but especially on men, animals and the produce of the earth. CHAPTER VI A BRIEF SUMMARY OF MOHAMMED’S WORK AND WORTH Taken as a whole, the Koran is certainly not a work of literary art. Mohammed, in a literary sense, was neither a poet nor a writer. He was, as he says of himself, only an illiterate apostle. This, from an artistic point of view, is of course regrettable. In his mother tongue he had a rich and splendid medium. A language of high philosophical and poetical character, that “follows the mind,” as Burton says, and gives birth to its offspring: that is free from the “luggage of particles” which clogs our modern tongues--leaves a mysterious vagueness between the relation of word to word, which materially assists the sentiment, not the sense of the poet. A language too that luxuriates in “rich and varied synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning,” that are artfully used--“now scattered to startle us by distinctness, now to form as it were a star about which dimly seen satellites revolve.” Finally which revels in a wealth of rhyme that leaves the poet almost unfettered to choose the desired or exact expression. Undoubtedly in a literary sense, here at hand, was a mighty and magnificent weapon. A quiverful of musical arrows, quivering as they waited for the poetic muse--the fine frenzy, the seething imagination, the running ready fire--to launch them forth into the humming haunts and hearts of men. But in no sense was this Merchant-Prophet a knight-errant. Kindly and tender as he was towards women and children, he was not addicted (as his countrymen were) to chivalry in any form. The race of heroines of Al Islam had no attraction for him. The “Hawa (or ‘Ishk’) uzri,” “pardonable love,” of the Bedawin, a certain species of platonic affection, did not exist for him. He had no room for such trivialities in his life. It was too serious and pre-occupied. Too much occupied with