Some time ago an American typewriter firm in advertising a machine with Arabic characters made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by more people than any other alphabet in the world. Some one thought that this was an exaggeration, and asked a professor of languages, “How big a lie is that?” He answered: “It is true.” The total population of all the countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic “A B C”—if they use any at all—is larger than the number of those who use the Latin alphabet or the Chinese character. The Arabic Koran is read by the Moslem boys in the day-schools not only of Arabia, but of Turkey, of Afghanistan, Persia, Java, Sumatra, the whole of North Africa and throughout Central Asia. In the Philippine Islands there are three hundred thousand Mohammedans whose only alphabet came from Arabia, and as far west as the mosques of Morocco the Arabic tongue has travelled and become the language of law and commerce and religion. When the early Arabs in their conquests crossed the strait between Africa and Spain and conquered that country they left many words behind. And therefore many of the place names in Spain to-day are Arabic. Gibraltar, for example, is the corrupted form of Jebel Tarik, which means the mountain of Tarik, the Arab general who first crossed the straits with his soldiers. And Quadiliquiver, one of the rivers of Spain, should be spelled Wady El Kebir, or the Big River. Even the English language has a number of words that came as Arab guests to the feast of reason and have been adopted into our family and put into our dictionary. When you speak of _algebra_, _ciphers_, _zero_, _alchemy_, _alcove_, _minaret_, _alcohol_, _coffee_, _sofa_, _amber_, _artichokes_, _gazelles_ or _magazine_ you are using good Arabic words which nearly every Arab would understand. To use these words, however, is quite a different thing from speaking “the language of the angels” correctly. It is easier to borrow a carpenter’s jack-knife than to acquire his skill in building a house. Many languages have borrowed from the Arabs and the Arabs have borrowed from them in return, but no language is richer than the Arabic in its number of words.