In modern degenerate days the Bayázis of Zanzibar have little education and no learning: they must even borrow from the Sunnis commentaries (Tafsir) and other religious works, whence they can extract food for their own cravings of belief. Of these the most popular are El Bokhári, the Jelálayn, and El Baghawi; the abstruse Bayzáwi is seldom troubled. Logic is neglected: history, philosophy, and the exact sciences are unknown. Being Arabs, they do not require El Sarf (accidence or the changes of the verb), and the Alfiyyeh of Ibn Malik is the only popular treatise upon the subject of El Nahw (syntax, and the changes of non- verbal parts of speech). The Kazis of the Bayázi and the Sunni schools lecture in their own houses upon the religious sciences, and the elementary establishments may number on the Island 15 or 16. Here boys learn to read the Koran, and to write the crabbed angular hand which distinguishes these Moslems. Nákhodás master a little arithmetic and navigation at Bombay and Calcutta. Some few have been sent to England and France, where they showed no want of attention or capacity: on their return to semi-barbarism, however, almost all went to the bad; they robbed and plotted, and most of them died of drunkenness and debauchery. The best education to be had at Zanzibar can only exercise the memory; it does little to cultivate the understanding or to improve the mind. Yet the people, averse to literary labour and despising learning in the presence of business, pleasure, or idleness, are shrewd and plodding ‘thinkers,’ and probably for the reason that their wits are not blunted by books and lectures, they are a match for Europeans in the everyday business of life. It is evident that where the profoundest ignorance of our elementary knowledge co-exists with practical wisdom, there is a large field for the labours of civilization, and that the western school, if kept strictly secular and pure of proselytizing, would be a blessing to the children of both sexes at Zanzibar. ----- Footnote 97: In 1846 M. Guillain proposed 3000, including a floating population of 300 to 400. Documents, &c., part ii. p. 78. Footnote 98: I have the words as they were written early in 1857. Footnote 99: It is easy to explain the preference of Arab women for slaves, and the predilection of the husbands for negro women: the subject, however, is somewhat too physiological for the general reader. Footnote 100: In Moslem countries Christians prefer the right breast. Footnote 101: Niebuhr terms them Beïasi and Abadhi (Travels in Arabia, chap. cxiv.). Salíl ibn Razik makes Abdullah the son, not the grandson, of Abáz. Footnote 102: These two Ashab or ‘Companions of the Apostle’ are popularly supposed to have been buried under a now ruined dome in a garden lying East of the Dahdah cemetery, Damascus. It is, however, a mistake; they were interred near Basreh where they fell in battle.