been, with respect to these notes, as careful as we were with respect to the text, endeavouring to respect as much as possible the personal work of the translator.

Now that the reader has all the necessary information about the French edition of the Sheikh Nefzaoui's work, he will permit us to make, in conclusion, a few remarks upon the ensemble of the book.

There are found in it many passages which are not attractive. The extraordinary ideas displayed - for instance, those about medicines and concerning the meanings of dreams - clash too directly with modern thought not to awaken in the reader a feeling more of boredom than of pleasure.

The work is certaInly encumbered with a quantity of matter which cannot but appear ridiculous in the eyes of the civilised modern reader; but we should not have been justified in weeding it out. We were bound to keep it intact as we had received it from our translator. We have held with the Italian proverb, Traduttore, traditore, that a work loses sufficient of its originality by being conveyed from its own tongue into another, and we hope that the plan we have adopted will meet with general approval. Those oddities are, moreover, instructive, as they make us acquainted with the manner and character of the Arab under a peculiar aspect, and not only of the Arab who was contemporary with our author, but also with the Arab of our own day. The latter is, in fact, not much more advanced than was the former. Although our contact with the race becomes closer every day in Tunis, Morocco, Egypt, and other Mussulman countries, they hold to their old medical prescriptions, have the same belief in divination, and honour the same mass of ridiculous notions, in which sorcery and amulets play a large part, and which appear to us supremely absurd. At the same time, one may observe from the very passages which we here refer to, that this people was not so averse as one might believe to witticisms, for the pun (calembour) occupies an important position in the explanations of dreams with which the author has studded the chapters on the sexual organs, apparently for no particular reason, but no doubt with the idea that no matter of interest should be absent from his work

The reader will perhaps also find that probability is frequently sacrificed to imagination. This is a distinctive mark in Arabic literature, and our work could not otherwise but exhibit the faults inherent in the genius of this race, which revels in the love for the marvellous, and amongst whose chief literary productions are to be counted The Thousand and One the Nights. But if these tales show such defaults very glaringly, they exhibit, on the other hand, charming qualities: simplicity, grace, delicacy; a mine of precious things which has been explored and made use of by many modern authors. We have pointed out, in some notes, the relationship which we found between these tales and those of Boccaccio and La Fontaine, but we could not draw attention to all. We had to pass over many with silence, and amongst them some of the most striking, as for instance in the case of `The Man Expert in Stratagems Duped by his Wife', which we find reproduced with all the perfect mastership of Balzac at the end of La Physiologie du Moorage.

We will not pursue this sketch any further. If instead of commencing the book with a preface we have preferred to address the reader at the end, this was done in order not to impose our views upon him and thus to stand between him and the work. Whether these additional lines will be read by him or not, we believe that we have done our duty by informing him of the direction we gave to our work. We tried, on the one hand, to prove the merits of the translator who furnished the basis for our labours, that is to say, the part which required the most science and study; while, on the other hand, we desired our readers to know in how far his translation had to be recast.

To the Arabophile who would wish to produce a better translation the way is left open; and in perfecting the work he is free to uncover the unknown beauties of the twenty-first chapter to his admiring contemporaries.