offered up to-day in Palestine:  for instance, if the first wife of a man is barren and the second wife has children, then the former vows that in return for a son she will give a lamb.  Apparently when it was thought desirable to be particularly solemn a horse was sacrificed, and this we hear of with the Persians, Indians, and more western people.  White was held to be the favourable colour, so we read in Herodotus (i. 189) that the Persians sacrificed white horses.  In Sweden it was thought that a black lamb must be dedicated to the water sprite before he would teach any one to play the harp.  As for the subsequent fate of the victim, Burton tells us that the Moslems do not look with favour on its being eaten.  Unlike them, Siberian Buriats will sacrifice a sheep and boil the mutton and hoist it on a scaffold for the gods, and chant a song and then consume the meat.  So, too, the zealous devil-worshippers of Travancore, whose diet is the putrid flesh of cattle and tigers, together with arrak and toddy and rice, which they have previously offered to their deities.

The words of Abu’l-Ala concerning day and night (quatrain 2) may be compared with what he says elsewhere: 

  These two, young for ever,
    Speed into the West—­
  Our life in their clutches—­
    And give us no rest.

“Generation goeth and generation cometh,” says Ecclesiastes, “while for ever the earth abideth.  The sun riseth also and the sun goeth down and cometh panting back to his place where he riseth.” . . .  The early dawn, the time of scarlet eyes, was also when the caravan would be attacked.  However, to this day the rising sun is worshipped by the Bedawi, despite the prohibition of Mahomet and despite the Moslem dictum that the sun rises between the devil’s horns.  Now the divinity of the stars (quatrain 4) had been affirmed by Plato and Aristotle; it was said that in the heavenly bodies dwelt a ruling intelligence superior to man’s, and more lasting.[2] And in Islam, whose holy house, the Kaaba, had traditionally been a temple of Saturn, we notice that the rationalists invariably connect their faith with the worship of Venus and other heavenly bodies.  We are told by ash-Shahrastani, in his Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, that the Indians hold Saturn for the greatest luck, on account of his height and the size of his body.  But such was not Abu’l-Ala’s opinion.  “As numb as Saturn,” he writes in one of his letters,[3] “and as dumb as a crab has every one been struck by you.”  Elsewhere he says in verse: 

  If dark the night, old Saturn is a flash
  Of eyes which threaten from a face of ash.