him move back into his house the be- ginning of the next week.
And that was the last I knew of any of them for more than a year. At first I expected, each hour, to hear that they had fallen somewhere. But time passed by, and of such a fall, where man knows the world's surface, there was no tale. I answered, as best I could, the letters of their friends, by saying I did not know where they were, and had not heard from them. My real thought was, that if this fatal MOON did indeed pass our atmosphere, all in it must have been burned to death in the transit. But this I whispered to no one save to Polly and Annie and Haliburton. In this terrible doubt I remained, till I noticed one day in the Astronomical Record the memorandum, which you perhaps remember, of the observa- tion, by Dr. Zitta, of a new asteroid, with an enormous movement in decli- nation.
[Mr. Ingham's observations on this
asteroid will be published in our next
number.]
MOHAMMED, AND HIS PLACE IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY.
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON once declared : " There are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world and the Mohammedan world ; all the rest may be considered as barbarous." Since Dr. Johnson's time we have learned to be curious about other forms of human thought, and regard the fa- mous line of Terence as expressing more accurately the proper frame of mind for a Christian philosopher. Nev- ertheless, Mohammedanism still claims a special interest and excites a peculiar curiosity. It is the only religion which has threatened Christianity with a dan- gerous rivalry. It is the only other reli- gion whose origin is in the broad daylight of history. Its author is the only one among the great men of the world who has at the same time founded a reli- gion, formed & people, and established an empire. The marvellous spread of this religion is a mystery which never ceases to stimulate the mind to new inquiry. How was it that in the short space of a century the Arab tribes, before always at war among them- selves, should have been united into an irresistible power, and have con- quered Syria, Persia, the whole of Northern Africa, and Spain? And with this religious outbreak, this great revival of Monotheism in Asia, there came also as remarkable a renaissance of learning, which made the Arabs the teachers of philosophy and art to Eu- rope during a long period. Arab Spain was a focus of light while Christian Eu- rope lay in mediaeval darkness. And still more interesting and perplexing is the character of Mohammed himself. What was he, an impostor, or a proph- et ? Did his work advance or retard human progress ? What is his posi- tion in history ? Such are some of the questions on which we shall endeavor to throw light in the present article.
Within a few years new materials for this study have been made accessible by the labors of Weil, Caussin de Per- ceval, Muir, Sprenger, Dollinger, and Arnold. Dr. Gustav Weil published his work* in 1843. It was drawn from Arabic manuscripts and the Koran. When Weil began his studies on Mo- hammed, in 1837, he found no book except that of Gagnier, published in 1732, from which he could derive sub- stantial aid. But Gagnier had only collected, without any attempt at criti- cism, the traditions and statements concerning Mohammed believed by or-
- Mohammed der Prophet, sein Lsben und seine
Lehre. Stuttgart, 1843. __.
