The principal source from which all biographers started and to which they always returned, was the Qorân, the collection of words of Allah spoken by Mohammed in those twenty-two years.

But, it is vain to endeavour to construct the life and teaching of Mohammed from such spurious accounts; they cannot even afford us a reliable illustration of his life in the form of "table talk," as an English scholar rather naïvely tried to derive from them.

The learned Abbé Maracci, who in 1698 produced a Latin translation of the Qorân accompanied by an elaborate refutation, was no less than Hottinger imbued with the necessity of shuddering at every mention of the "false" Prophet, and Dr. Prideaux, whose Vie de Mahomet appeared in the same year in Amsterdam, abused and shuddered with them, and held up his biography of Mohammed as a mirror to "unbelievers, atheists, deists, and libertines.

We shall probably never know, by intercourse with whom it really was that Mohammed at last gained some knowledge of the contents of the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity; probably through various people, and over a considerable length of time.

Reluctantly, but decidedly at last, it was conceded that the foundations laid by Mohammed for the life of his community were by no means all to be found in the Holy Book; rather, that Mohammed's revelations without his explanation and practice would have remained an enigma.

Thus, when the janissary showed me what he called kundergo, growing in the fields, and explained that it made a blue dye, and I told him that we called it indigo, he never rested until he had learned the word, which he repeated to Mohammed and Mohammed to him.

This prosaic fact was converted by the adherents of the House of Mohammed into the romance, that the last imâm of a line of seven according to some, and twelve according to others, had disappeared in a mysterious way, to return at the end of days as Mahdî, the Guided One, who should restore the political order which had been disturbed ever since Mohammed's death.

It has been generally assumed that the Arabian conquerors who, within a few years of his death, spread the faith of Mohammed over vast regions, belonged to an essentially non-maritime race; and little or no stress has been laid on the extent to which they relied on naval support in prosecuting their conquests.

"There was a little trouble, your Highness, with one Ishak Mohammed andIshak Mohammed's son is still alive.