expected; and when the enquiry seemed given up in despair as after a thing which had been utterly and irrecoverably lost. Moreover, when it is found that the mysteries thus unlocked have immediate reference to our faith, and confirm, by the strongest evidence and in the most direct manner, the sacred records of our religion, and also afford illustrations of the mode in which the languages as well as the faith of other nations have been derived from the Hebrew, our devotional and traditional feelings are called into exercise, to enhance the intellectual gratification; and we welcome the intelligence as a moral benefit, over and above the interest we find in an important discovery. But we must proceed in order. The history of the religion of Mahomet, suited at first to the character of one people, but which in the event manifested such extraordinary elasticity and vigour as to bring within its grasp half of the then known world, and to hold with the tenacity of a fiend all that it had at any time acquired these peculiar circumstances turned the attention of Mr. Forster to the history of ancient Arabia, in reference to the sources from whence a popu lation having this strength of character could be derived; into what tribes they were divided; in what regions they were settled, or are to be found, at the present day; and what were the features which all might possess in common what were distinct and characteristic. When an enquiry of this kind is begun in faith-that is, in full persuasion that the inspired volume is true such an enquiry will be rewarded with double success. It will be crowned, not only with attainment of the things sought for, but with the higher reward of illustrating and confirming the things already believed, and thus adding greatly to the faith both of the individual thus honoured, and also to that of the whole Church. Truth of this kind is fructiferous as well as luciferous: it makes us wiser-it makes us also better men. And in the discovery of the hand of God, who ordereth all things from the beginning, appointing to men their several dwelling-places, and the bounds of their habitation, we may recognize the same God as our God; who is near at hand as well as afar off; the God who is about our path and our bed, and is acquainted with all our ways. “Q Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off; thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo! O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me." The Arabs, or mingled people, as the name imports, not withstanding the number of distinct tribes, have all one strong characteristic, of tenacity for ancient customs, and for the names of places and persons; so that we seem to behold in them all a primitive race, occupying the same seats from the earliest times; and may trace the present names of places to similar localities in Ptolemy and the earliest geographers, and, through them, to the scriptural names of the heads of the several nations and tribes in Genesis; from whom the names of the places are, for the most part, derived. This characteristic tenacity has furnished the principle by which Mr. Forster has been guided în rectifying the geography of Arabia. He constructed a skeleton map of the whole country between the Arabian and Persian gulphs, according to the accurate observations of modern times; and, on this sure basis, endeavoured to place correctly all the mountains and rivers, all the districts or tribes named by Ptolemy, checking these names continually by references to the modern appellations, and by whatever notices could be found in Scripture, and were evidently intended to apply to similar places and people. The advantage of this sober and rational way of proceeding immediately appeared, in the detection of the chief cause of that perplexity which all the moderns have complained of, in this portion especially of the descriptions of Ptolemy. From the imperfect state of geography, and especially from the want of observations, no correct map could be formed in the time of Ptolemy; and from this, or some unaccountable cause, he had passed over a large extent of coast between two rivers, confounding them as though they were one river, and had in consequence omitted the great desert of Ahkaf, between Oman and Mecea! no wonder, therefore, that modern geographers were somewhat perplexed. It would be like forcing the contents of an Ephalı into the Homer. "The writer having, for his own satisfaction, analized and distributed nearly the whole of the denominations in Ptolemy, so as to appropriate them to the modern nomenclature, was at once surprised and rewarded by the discovery of two capital omissions in the Arabia of this geographer-the pretermission, on the one hand, of the entire middle part of the southern coasta lapse involving the confounding into one, the Caua, Canim, or Hargiali, and Prion, or Prim rivers and whether cause or consequence of this unaccountable error, the equally total suppression, on the other hand, of the great inland deserts between Nedjd and Yemen. This discovery, which is readily established by comparison of the adjacent localities, broke at once upon the eye, immediately on the completion of the general adjustment of Ptolemy's nomenclature; which, when distributed on a new map of Arabia, engraved after the latest surveys, for the present work, fell exactly within the limits of the great mountain belt, or girdle, by which the inland deserts are encircled; leaving those empty or deserted abodes, as they are expressively styled by the Arabs, precisely as they are laid down in the best modern maps; and disposing the ancient inhabitants accurately in the positions which the corresponding modern names occupy at the present day."-(Introduction, lii.). The determination of the point last mentioned-of the correspondence of the modern names with those of Ptolemy-is attended with great difficulties, and upon the judicious mastering of these, so as to place the correspondence between the ancient and modern names beyond dispute, the whole value of these researches must depend. Scarcely any two languages can present more points of dissimilarity than the languages of Arabia and Greece; unlike in the organs of speech, in the power of letters, and in the direction of writing. Many of the Arabic sounds cannot be written in Greek; scarcely any of the Arabic letters have exact equivalents in Greek; and some of them have no place at all in the Greek alphabet, because the sound they express has no place in the language of Greece. The vowels which are of importance in Greek are of none at all in Arabic, and the opposite directions in which they wrote occasioned frequent transposition of syllables, in putting the names of one of these countries into the written language of the other. 1 We know it to be a general fact that all Asiatic names have undergone great changes in passing into the literature of Greece; for one or other of the above named causes of confusion has always been in operation: and, as the geography of Ptolemy was in great request by the Arabs, after the lust of conquest had subsided, and when they began to cultivate letters and the arts of peace-so this subjected the names of Ptolemy to a second transference of the same hazardous kind, in which all traces of the original name might be entirely obliterated, and the more so by having passed into the original language and locality, because there it would be, that we should the least incline to suspect, that any change whatever had passed upon it. And even the Hebrew names often become obscure in the Arabic, from the liberties which the Arabs allow of transposition, and suppression, and substitution of one or more letters by other letters belonging to the same organ. These several "causes of verbal obscurity" are noticed by Mr. Foster in the introduction. As the anagram, where Samuel is written Asmael, Soktan is Kahtan, and the lake Ascanias is written Nicoea and even Is-Nik.-(Rennell, ii. 107). The suppression of the first syllable, as Apatei for Napatei or Nabatei, Maan for Teman, Cogni or Kuniah for Iconium-with many other : causes arising from transposition of the article or other prefix to the middle or end of the name; and variable pronunciation in different dialects, which has produced various modes of spelling the same name-as Seger, Sagur, or Shehr; Ituræa, Jetur, or Djedour and Katabania would not readily suggest the Beni Kahtan; and still less should we expect to find in the Agubeni, the sons of Job, the Beni Ayub of the Arabic: while in Areregia, translated apη Baristov by the Greeks, the original Hargiah disappears altogether. From hence it appears how thoroughly absurd it would be for any one not well acquainted with these causes of obscurity to undertake the identification of names of places in Arabia; and how incompetent any mere European scholar would be to form a judgment on the truth of such identification by sound alone. Even the illustrious D'Anville has fallen into several mistakes, misled by sound alone, some of which are pointed out by Mr. Forster (lxii. lxiii) :– tion 1 In the following work (adds Mr. Forster), no one important posihas been laid down as verified, without its having been previously subjected to every possible variety of test: such as, correspondence with the site, apparently assigned by the ancients, while still preserving the ancient name; correspondence, further, with neighbouring ascertained localities; and correspondence, lastly, with the direction of the coasts-with transverse lines, verifying the relative bearings to remoter points of the peninsula and with measurements, showing the coinciding connection of the ancient and modern position with adjacent places, in point of distance.” (lxiv). Aided by these lights, and using these precautions, Mr. Forster has assigned the vast region of Arabia Felix as the proper country of the families of Cush and Joktan, though they have at an early period extended northward to the head of the Persian gulph, and subsequently penetrated southward to the heart of the province of Yemen. The settlements of Ishmael, Keturah, and Esau, have been tracked through the whole of Arabia Petræa and Arabia Deserta, or the line of country extending from the borders of Egypt to the Euphrates in Scripture phraseology, from Shur to Havilah. And thus, great help has been afforded to the student of Scripture, while our faith also is greatly strengthened. For, as Mr. Forster beautifully remarks :-- "Scientific researches would have no charm, were they not connected with subjects of a far higher strain. Arabia opens a field for better things than curious speculations: it is the country of the first post-diluvian patriarchs the nursery of the earliest ancient prophets the soil in which the primitive families of mankind were originally planted, by the finger of God. Whatever interest, therefore, Arabian geography may possess, in the eyes of the scholar, or of the votary of science, it has paramount claims on the attention of the Christian theologian. In this aspect it was that the present subject first engaged the thoughts of the writer, in connection with a former work. The wanton cavils of infidelity against the Mosaic account of the peopling of Arabia induced him to direct, so far as the nature and limits of that work permitted, his serious attention to a comparative survey of the historical authorities, sacred and profane, with a view to the establishment of one great point, contested by Mr. Gibbon and his imitators, the descent of the Arabs from Ishmael...... Accordingly as, in the progress of this enquiry, the Scriptures of the Old Testament were gradually compared with the Greek and Roman geopraphers, and both authorities with the materials supplied by the Oriental geographers and by modern atlasses and travels-the author found opening upon him a consent of evidences, and a concurrence of testimonies, altogether beside and beyond anticipation. All, or nearly all, the names of nations mentioned in the Mosaic records, and in the later Scriptures, as springing from the five great patriarchal stocks of Cush, Joktan, Ishmael, Keturah, and Esau, successively disclosed themselves, in the pages of Ptolemy and Pliny, when disencumbered only of their Greek and Latin terminations, as the names of the chief tribes and nations which, in their day, still inhabited Arabia." (xl.) Arabia is first regarded as Cushan, or the land of Cush-a primary name for this land derived from that of the firstborn of Ham, as the name for Egypt was derived from that of Mizraim, Ham's second son. Seba, the eldest son of Cush, gave his name likewise to an extensive district of the interior, and the Sabeans, his descendants, were remarkable for their stature, as the Cushites in general were for the darkness of their skin, and their early addiction to commerce. "Thus, saith the Lord, the labour of Egypt, and merchandize of Cush, and the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee." (Isai. xlv.) "Can the Cushite change his skin?" (Jer. xiii. 23). It is also shown that Cush and Midian are interchangeable terms, from Zipporah, the wife of Moses, being sometimes called an Ethiopian or Cushite, and at other times of Midian-which district was, however, understood of that part of Arabia which lay near the Red Sea, below Ezion Geber, and on the eastern side of the Elanitic gulph; and the Sabeans inhabited the opposite side of the peninsula. "The Arabs of the Persian gulph (observed Colonel Chesney to the author), are a fine race of men, remarkable for lofty stature, and dark complexion: in both respects differing markedly from the tribes on the Arabian gulph." (i. 31). Looking at this first peopled portion of the world after the flood as a whole, M. Heeren observes :-" It cannot be doubted |