FOOTNOTES

1 Essai sur L'Histoire des Arabes avant L'Islamisme, Pendant L'Epoque de Mahomet, et jusqu'à la réduction de toutes les tribus sous la loi Musulmane. Par A. P. Caussin de Perceval, Professeur d'Arabe au Collége Royal de France. Trois Tomes. Paris, 1847-8.

M. Caussin de Perceval has in these volumes traced the history of the Arabian tribes and States, from the earliest glimmerings of Mahometan tradition, to the period when the whole were united under the banner of Islam. Throwing together the multitudinous and often discrepant genealogies, and accounts of individuals and of tribes, he has collated the several steps of various lines, noting at what points they meet, and where the tradition of events disproves or corroborates the tradition of names. The result of his investigations is exhibited with great ingenuity and clearness, in fifteen tables or genealogical trees, in which the descent of the chief tribes and most famous personages or the Peninsula is traced up, with the approximate era of each generation, to the most remote period for which tradition furnishes authority. These tables add much to the value of the book, for the mind of the ordinary reader is bewildered with the maze of collateral families and tribes crossing and re-crossing each other's path.

I am not aware that the Information given in C. de Perceval's two first volumes is anywhere available to the English reader in a complete and digested form; and I hare therefore deemed it the more necessary to give as much detail in the narrative as this object of the chapter would admit of.

2 That is "the barrier," as lying between Yemen and Syria; or the frontier between the northern and southern merchants. C. de Perceval, vol.i. p. 2; Sprenger's Mohammed p.14. Burton inclines to another meaning, viz., "the colligated by mountains," vol. ii. p. 165.

3 From the absence of any English name for these channels Burton applies the Sicilian appellation fumara to them. In India the word Nallah and in the vicinity of the Himalayas the local term Rao, gives the same signification. In Arabia the common name is masyal or masilah (from sayl) i.e. place of a flood or torrent. See Burton's Mecca and Medina, vol.i. p. 368.