authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its whither. Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently great. Shortly, they are two. The mass of material is overpowering; the strangeness of the ideas involved is perplexing. The wealth of material will become plain, to some extent at least, as the history is traced; but for the strangeness of the contents, of the arrangement and the atmosphere of these codes some preparation must be given from the outset. How, indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows no distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal law; which prescribes and describes the use of the toothpick and decides when a wedding invitation may be declined, which enters into the minutest and most unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of religious retreat? Is it by some subtle connection of thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter on bankruptcy and composition? One thing, at least, is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most absolute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of all things, human and divine. It tells what we must render to Caesar and what to God, what to ourselves, and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything that a man shall believe of things in heaven and in earth and beneath the earth—and this is no flat rhetoric—Muslim law prescribes everything that a man shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in

terms of duty. Nothing can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so.

It will, therefore, be well for the student to work through the sketch of a code of Muslim law which is inserted in Appendix I. One has been chosen which belongs to the school of ash-Shafi'i because of its general accessibility. It should be remembered that what is given is the merest table of contents. The standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to eight hundred and eleven closely printed quarto pages. Even a mere reading of this table of contents, however, will show in how different a sphere of thought from ours Muslin law moves and lives. But we must return to the beginning of things, to the egg from which this tremendous system was hatched.

The mother-city of Islam was the little town of Yathrib, called Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the Hijra or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of the Christian era. Here the first Muslim state was founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim jurisprudence fired. Both state and jurisprudence were the result of the inter-working of the same highly complicated causes. The ferments in the case may be classified and described as follows: First, in the town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on its little stage little, but so momentous for the future—there were two parties, often at war, oftener at peace. There was a genuine Arab element and