Moreover, the idea that the fall of the human race is connected with agriculture is found, besides the analogous cases commonly adduced by commentators, to be also often represented in the legends of the East African negroes, especially in the Calabar legend of the Creation communicated by Bastian,[236] which presents many interesting points of comparison with the Biblical story of the Fall. The first human pair is called by a bell at meal-times to Abasi (the Calabar God) in heaven; and in place of the forbidden tree of Genesis are put agriculture and propagation, which Abasi strictly denies to the first pair. The fall is denoted by the transgression of both these commands, especially through the use of implements of tillage, to which the woman is tempted by a female friend who is given to her. From that moment man fell and became mortal, so that, as the Bible story has it, he can ‘eat bread only in the sweat of his face.’ There agriculture is a curse, a fall from a more perfect stage to a lower and imperfect one. This view of the agricultural life is, however, not the conception of nomads only; it is proper also to nations which have not even reached the stage of nomadism, but stand a step lower—the hunters. To them their own condition appears the happiest, and that of the agriculturist condemned by a curse. ‘The countries inhabited by savages,’ as Montesquieu makes his Persian Usbek write,[237] ‘are generally sparsely peopled, through the distaste which almost all of them have for labour and the tillage of the soil. This unfortunate aversion is so strong that when they make an imprecation against one of their enemies, they wish him nothing worse than that he may be reduced to field-labour,[238] deeming no exercise noble and worthy of them except hunting and fishing.’ This contempt of a sedentary life and its usage is by the Bedâwî directed also especially against the practice of arts and manufactures. Hence it comes that such peoples as the Arabs, which even in a sedentary condition regard nomadic life as a nobler stage of manners than the agricultural life to which they have _fallen_, neglect manufactures and seldom attain to any perfection in them. This is especially true of the inhabitants of the holy cities of the Arabian peninsula, who give a practical proof of their preference for Beduinism by the fact that the Sherîf-families let their sons pass their childhood in the tents of the desert for the sake of a nobler education. ‘I am inclined to think,’ says the credible traveller Burckhardt in his description of the inhabitants of Medina,[239] ‘that the want of artisans here is to be attributed to the very low estimation in which they are held by the Arabians, whose pride often proves stronger than their cupidity, and prevents a father from educating his sons in any craft. This aversion they probably inherit from the ancient inhabitants, the Bedouins, who, as I have remarked,