11. Mîr Salâmat Alî is a stanch Sunnî, the sect of Osmân; and they are always at daggers drawn with the Shîas, or the sect of Alî. He alludes to the Shîas when he says that one of the seventy-two sects is always ready to take in the whole of the other seventy-one. Muhammad, according to the traditions, was one day heard to say, 'The time will come when my followers will he divided into seventy-three sects; all of them will assuredly go to hell save one.' Every one of the seventy-three sects believes itself to be the one happily excepted by their prophet, and predestined to paradise. I am sometimes disposed to think Muhammad was self-deluded, however difficult it might be to account for so much 'method in his madness'. It is difficult to conceive a man placed in such circumstances with more amiable dispositions or with juster views of the rights and duties of men in all their relations with each other, than are exhibited by him on almost all occasions, save where the question of _faith_ in his divine mission was concerned. A very interesting and useful book might be made out of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their glory. [W. H. S.] For an account of Muhammadan sects, see section viii of the Preliminary Dissertation in Sale's Korân, entitled, 'Of the Principal Sects among the Muhammadans; and of those who have pretended to Prophecy among the Arabs, in or since the Time of Muhammad'; and T. P. Hughes, _Dictionary of Islam_ (1885). The chief sects of the Sunnîs, or Traditionists, are four in number. 'The principal sects of the Shîas are five, which are subdivided into an almost innumerable number.' The court of the kings of Oudh was Shîa. In most parts of India the Sunnî faith prevails. The relation between genius and insanity is well expressed by Dryden (_Absalom and Achitopfel_): Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. The treatise of Professor Cesare Lombroso, entitled _The Man of Genius_ (London edition, 1891), is devoted to proof and illustration of the proposition that genius is 'a special morbid condition'. He deals briefly with the case of Muhammad at pages 31, 39, and 325, maintaining that the prophet, like Saint Paul, Julius Caesar, and many other men of genius, was subject to epileptic fits. The Professor's book seems to be exactly what Sir W. H. Sleeman desired to see.