atters, but have been recorded
here as having particularly excelled in this particular branch of
learning.

Al Kasim bin Ma'an was the first who wrote on the rarities of the
language and on the peculiarities of authors, and, according to the
'Fihrist,' he surpassed all his contemporaries by the variety of his
information. Tradition and traditionists, poetry and poets, history
and historians, scholastic theology and theologians, genealogy and
genealogists, were the subjects on which he displayed the extent of
his acquirements. He died A.D. 791.

Abu Ali Muhammad bin-al Mustanir bin Ahmad, generally known by the
name of Kutrub, was also a grammarian and philologist, and wrote books
and treatises on these subjects, as also on natural history. He died
A.D. 821.

Philology and Arabic poetry were the special objects of the studies of
Abu Amr Ishak bin Mirar as Shaibani, and in these two branches of
knowledge his authority is of the highest order. He composed a number
of works and treatises, and wrote with his own hand upwards of eighty
volumes. He died A.D. 825.

But the two earliest, and perhaps the two most celebrated,
philologists were Al-Asmai and Abu Obaida, who outshone their
successors for all time to come, and were distinguished--the former by
his wit, and the latter by his scholarship.

Abu Said Abd-al Malik bin Kuraib al-Asmai was born A.D. 739 or 740,
and died A.D. 831. He was a complete master of the Arabic language, an
able grammarian, and the most eminent of all those who transmitted
orally historical narrations, anecdotes, stories, and rare expressions
of the language. When the poet Abu Nuwas was informed that Asmai and
Abu Obaida had been introduced at Harun's court, he said that the
latter would narrate ancient and modern history, but that the former
would charm with his melodies. Ibn Shabba was informed by Asmai
himself 'that he knew by heart sixteen thousand pieces of verse
composed in the measure called Rajaz, or free metre,' and Ishak al
Mausili asserted 'that he never heard al-Asmai profess to know a
branch of science without discovering that none knew it better than
he.' No one ever explained better than Al-Asmai the idioms of the
desert Arabs. Most of his works, which amount to thirty-six, treat of
the language and its grammar; but he also wrote a book on the horse
and different treatises on various other animals, such as the camel,
the sheep, wild beasts, etc., and their physiology.

Al-Asmai