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PREFACE.
The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture was first introduced to the notice of Europe by St. Thomas Aquinas, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, though it had already been cited by Moses Maimonides in the More Nevochim some hundred years previously, from whence, no doubt, it had become known to most of the learned Spanish Jews who, at the period, shed so great a lustre upon Hebrew Literature and Biblical Science.
Startling as it is to find in its pages mention of a literature and civilization so
