interpretations fastened on them as feast-days and popular festivals. Hebron was a place suitable for this treatment, and so popular tradition placed there the bones of the Patriarchs and their wives, and attached the general national piety to the place. Accordingly King David acted in sympathy with the lately aroused national enthusiasm, when he chose Hebron for his residence (2 Sam. II. 1, 11). And the popular belief concerning the graves of the Patriarchs was so firmly fixed in the soul of the nation as to become in later generations a meeting-point of the piety of three religions towards their sacred antiquity. Mohammedans, Jews, and Christians vie with each other in the adorations which they lavish on the ‘Double Cave’ at Hebron. Mohammedans, who place the prophet Ibrâhîm al-Chalîl higher than either Jews or Christians, have done more for the authenticity of the graves of the Patriarchs at Hebron than either of the older religions, from which they received the tradition concerning them. I know of no literary work emanating from Christians or Jews, written in defence of the authenticity of this cave. Conviction was left to faith and piety rather than to historical certainty. But it was a Mohammedan—not even an Arab, but a Persian—that undertook this task. ʿAlî b. Jaʿfar al-Râzî wrote a book entitled al-musfir lil-ḳulûb ʿan ṣiḥḥat ḳabr Ibrâhîm Isḥâḳ wa-Yaʿḳûb ‘Enlightener of hearts concerning the correctness of the grave of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Ibn Baṭûṭâ of Maġreb (North-Western Africa), a great Mohammedan traveller, who made a pilgrimage to al-Chalîl (Hebron), quotes largely from this book on occasion of his description of the Graves of the Patriarchs.[658] But popular tradition has preserved far more recollections of graves of Patriarchs and Prophets than Scripture, and Mohammedan tradition considerably more than Jewish. This testifies eloquently how incomplete stories are felt to be as long as they can tell only of events and persons without connecting everything with a definite locality. Popular tradition always feels the want of topographical completion, as long as it can give no distinct account of the places where the events of which it speaks took place, where its favourite heroes lived and worked, where they were cradled and where they slept their last sleep. This impulse was felt in ancient times, and produced the localisation of myths. Accordingly, the Mohammedan popular tradition knows of the grave of Adam on the mountain Abû Ḳubeys,[659] of that of Eve at Jeddâ, of that of Cain and Abel at Ṣâliḥîyyâ, a suburb of Damascus, of that of Seth in the valley of Yahfûfâ in Antilibanus,[660] and of those of some of Jacob’s sons, as of Reuben at Jahrân, a place in the south of Arabia,[661] of Asher and Naphtali at Kafarmandâ, between ʿAkkâ (Acre) and Tiberias. Even Zipporah, the wife of Moses, was a person sufficiently interesting to popular tradition to have a grave