“The Koran is the Arabic name for the Mohammedan Bible, or collection of discourses held by Mohammed in the name of God, in his quality as inspired prophet, which, as he asserts, were partly communicated through the angel Gabriel, partly revealed to him immediately by God through dreams or visions. But the Koran is not, like the Bible, a book drawn up in chronological order, or according to the variety of its contents, but a mixing up of hymns, prayers, dogmas, sermons, casual writings, narratives, legends, laws, and orders of the day, with many repetitions and contradictions. This comes because Mohammed himself made no collection of the revelations given singly to him during a course of twenty-three years. It is probable that it was not even his wish that all of them should be kept, since a great number of them had only a transitory meaning. Likewise he had undertaken so many alterations in his doctrines and laws that he had reason to shrink from handing them all down to posterity. In fine he certainly wished to retain up to his death free room for modifications and additions which might be necessary. But after his death all fragments of the revelation were thrown together, even when they had been repealed by others, or were already issued in different form. All portions of the Koran, scattered in different hands, inscribed on parchment, palm-leaves, bones, stones, or other rough materials for writing, were collected—or even such as lived only in the remembrance of his companions and disciples—and were divided, mostly without regard to their contents, or the time at which they had been revealed, into greater or smaller chapters, Suras; and thus the actual Koran, with all its defects, was made. It is only by an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of Mohammed’s life, and the language of the Koran, in some degree possible to restore the chronological order of its several parts. By the help of Mohammed’s Arabian biographers, some of whom go back so far as the second century of the Mohammedan era, it is possible to determine the date of such sections as relate to historical events. Where this is not the case, the character and form of the revelation serve to direct. Mohammed in his first time appears more as a reformer, later as the founder of a new religion, at last as prince and legislator. In the first period he was carried away by inward enthusiasm: his language has a rhythmical movement, with true poetic colouring. In the second period a calmer consideration takes the place of excited fancy; he is more rhetorician than poet: his words spring rather from an understanding wide awake, not sparkling, as before, with warmth of heart. In the third period the language sinks to sober prose, not only in ordaining laws, issuing injunctions, or narrating campaigns, but when he paints, as before, God’s Almightiness, the wonders of creation, the terrors of the last judgment, or the joys of paradise.