story-tellers, who were extremely unwilling to part with them, looking upon them as their stock in trade, and were in the habit of incorporating with the genuine text all kinds of stories and anecdotes from other sources, to fill the place of the missing portions of the original work.  This process of addition and incorporation, which has been in progress ever since the first collection of the Nights into one distinct work and is doubtless still going on in Oriental countries, (especially such as are least in contact with European influence,) may account for the heterogeneous character of the various modern MSS. of the Nights and for the immense difference which exists between the several texts, as well in actual contents as in the details and diction of such stories as are common to all.  The Tunis Ms. of the 1001 Nights (which is preserved in the Breslau University Library and which formed the principal foundation of Habicht’s Edition of the Arabic text) affords a striking example of this process, which we are here enabled to see in mid-operation, the greater part of the tales of which it consists having not yet been adapted to the framework of the Nights.  It is dated A.H. 1144 (A.D. 1732) and of the ten volumes of which it consists, i, ii (Nights I—­CCL) and x (Nights DCCCLXXXV-MI) are alone divided into Nights, the division of the remaining seven volumes (i.e. iii—­ix, containing, inter alia, the Story of the Sleeper Awakened) being the work of the German editor.  It is my belief, therefore, that the three “interpolated” tales identified as forming part of the Baghdad Ms. of 1703 are comparatively modern stories added to the genuine text by Rawis (story-tellers) or professional writers employed by them, and I see no reason to doubt that we shall yet discover the Arabic text of the remaining eight, either in Hanna’s version (as written down for Galland) or in some as yet unexamined Ms. of the Nights or other work of like character.

V.

M. Zotenberg has, with great judgment, taken as his standard for publication the text of Aladdin given by the Sebbagh Ms., inasmuch as the Shawish Ms. (besides being, as appears from the extracts given. [FN#20] far inferior both in style and general correctness,) is shown by the editor to be full of modern European phrases and turns of speech and to present so many suspicious peculiarities that it would be difficult, having regard, moreover, to the doubtful character and reputation of the Syrian monkish adventurer who styled himself Dom Denis Chavis, to resist the conviction that his Ms. was a forgery, i.e. professedly a copy of a genuine Arabic text, but in reality only a translation or paraphrase in that language of Galland’s version,—­were it not that the Baghdad Ms. (dated before the commencement, in 1704, of Galland’s publication and transcribed by a man—­Mikhail Sebbagh—­whose reputation, as a collaborator of Silvestre de Sacy and other distinguished Orientalists,