and the Judgment Day, many a promise of Paradise and threat of hell, he plaintively confesses, "I do not know what will be done with you or me hereafter." The Koran thus betrays a human and not a very noble intellectual origin. It does not however follow that its author was, as is so often asserted, a mere impostor. He reiterates again and again, "I am nothing more than a public preacher." He defends, not always without acerbity, his work from those who even in his own life stigmatized it as a confused heap of dreams, or what is worse, a forgery. He is not the only man who has supposed himself to be the subject of supernatural and divine communications, for this is a condition of disease to which any one, by fasting and mental anxiety, may be reduced. In what I have thus said respecting a work held by so many millions of men as a revelation from God, I have endeavored to speak with respect and yet with freedom, constantly bearing in mind how deeply to this book Asia and Africa are indebted for daily guidance, how deeply Europe and America for the light of science. As might be expected, the doctrines of the Koran have received many fictitious additions and sectarian interpretations in the course of ages. In the popular superstition angels and genii largely figure. The latter, being of a grosser fabric, eat, drink, propagate their kind, are of two sorts, good and bad, and existed long before men, having occupied the earth before Adam. Immediately after death, two greenish livid angels, Monkir and Nekkar, examine every corpse as to its faith in God and Mohammed; but the soul, having been separated from the body by the angel of death, enters upon an intermediate state, awaiting the resurrection. There is however much diversity of opinion as to its precise disposal before the Judgment Day: some think that it hovers near the grave; some, that it sinks into the well Zemzem; some, that it retires into the trumpet of the angel of the resurrection; the difficulty apparently being that any final disposal before the Day of Judgment would be anticipatory of that great event, if indeed it would not render it needless. As to the resurrection, some believe it to be merely spiritual, others corporeal; the latter asserting that the _os coccygis_, or last bone of the spinal column, will serve as it were as a germ; and that, vivified by a rain of forty days, the body will sprout from it. Among the signs of the approaching resurrection will be the rising of the sun in the west. It will be ushered in by three blasts of a trumpet: the first, known as the blast of consternation, will shake the earth to its centre, and extinguish the sun and stars; the second, the blast of extermination, will annihilate all material things except Paradise, hell, and the throne of God. Forty years subsequently, the angel Israfil will sound the blast of resurrection. From his trumpet there will be blown forth the countless myriads of