ry man came into the world without his own
knowledge, he is to depart from it perhaps against his own wishes. Then
let him calmly fold his hands, and expect the issues of fate.

Coincidently with this change of opinion as to the government of
individual life, there came a change as respects the mechanical
construction of the world. According to the Koran, the earth is a square
plane, edged with vast mountains, which serve the double purpose of
balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome of the sky. Our
devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God should be excited by
the spectacle of this vast crystalline brittle expanse, which has been
safely set in its position without so much as a crack or any other
injury. Above the sky, and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven
stories, the uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form
of a gigantic man, sits on a throne, having on either side winged bulls,
like those in the palaces of old Assyrian kings.

THEY MEASURE THE EARTH. These ideas, which indeed are not peculiar to
Mohammedanism, but are entertained by all men in a certain stage of
their intellectual development as religious revelations, were
very quickly exchanged by the more advanced Mohammedans for others
scientifically correct. Yet, as has been the case in Christian
countries, the advance was not made without resistance on the part
of the defenders of revealed truth. Thus when Al-Mamun, having become
acquainted with the globular form of the earth, gave orders to his
mathematicians and astronomers to measure a degree of a great circle
upon it, Takyuddin, one of the most celebrated doctors of divinity
of that time, denounced the wicked khalif, declaring that God would
assuredly punish him for presumptuously interrupting the devotions
of the faithful by encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical
philosophy among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of
the Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the
elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two stations
on the same meridian, exactly one degree apart. The distance between
the two stations was then measured, and found to be two hundred thousand
Hashemite cubits; this gave for the entire circumference of the earth
about twenty-four thousand of our miles, a determination not far
from the truth. But, since the spherical form could not be positively
asserted from one such measurement, the kh