if it signified black eyes, the almost universal colour.  Zarka of Yamamah is the name of a celebrated heroine in Arab story, and the curious reader, who wishes to see how much the West is indebted to the East, even for the materials of legend, will do well to peruse her short history in Major Price’s “Essay,” or M.C. de Perceval’s “Essai,” &c., vol. i., p. 101.  Both of these writers, however, assert that Zarka’s eyes, when cut out, were found to contain fibres blackened by the use of Kohl, and they attribute to her the invention of this pigment.  I have often heard the legend from the Arabs, who declare that she painted her eyes with “Ismid,” a yellow metal, of what kind I have never been able to determine, although its name is everywhere known. [FN#9] Burckhardt confounds the Ayn al-Zarka with the Bir al-Khatim, or Kuba well, of whose produce the surplus only mixes with it, and he complains loudly of the “detestable water of Madinah.”  But he was ill at the time, otherwise he would not have condemned it so strongly after eulogising the salt-bitter produce of the Meccan Zemzem. [FN#10] The people of Nijd, as Wallin informs us, believe that the more the palms are watered, the more syrup will the fruit produce; they therefore inundate the ground, as often as possible.  At Al-Jauf, where the date is peculiarly good, the trees are watered regularly every third or fourth day. [FN#11] Properly meaning the Yellow Wind or Air.  The antiquity of the word and its origin are still disputed. [FN#12] Burckhardt (Travels in Arabia, vol. ii.) informs us, that in A.D. 1815, when Meccah, Yambu’, and Jeddah suffered severely from the plague, Al-Madinah and the open country between the two seaports escaped. [FN#13] Conjecture, however, goes a little too far when it discovers small-pox in the Tayr Ababil, the “swallow birds,” which, according to the Koran, destroyed the host of Abrahat al-Ashram.  Major Price (Essay) may be right in making Ababil the plural of Abilah, a vesicle; but it appears to me that the former is an Arabic and the latter a Persian word, which have no connection whatever.  M.C. de Perceval, quoting the Sirat al-Rasul, which says that at that time small-pox first appeared in Arabia, ascribes the destruction of the host of Al-Yaman to an epidemic and a violent tempest.  The strangest part of the story is, that although it occurred at Meccah, about two months before Mohammed’s birth, and, therefore, within the memory of many living at the time, the Prophet alludes to it in the Koran as a miracle. [FN#14] In Al-Yaman, we are told by Niebuhr, a rude form of inoculation-the mother pricking the child’s arm with a thorn-has been known from time immemorial.  My Madinah friend assured me that only during the last generation, this practice has been introduced amongst the Badawin of Al-Hijaz. [FN#15] Orientals divide their diseases, as they do remedies and articles of diet, into hot, cold, and temperate.