Rarely has the art of East and West blended more happily than in this superb seventeenth century portrait of a painter. In so many Persian miniatures figures and drapery are rendered conventionally in a style tradition has made classical; and the classical, as Greece as taught us, is so apt to become “faultily faultless, splendidly null”. Here instead of any vacuous type is a definite individual with personality expressed in hands and arms, in the droop of the neck and in the intense concentration of the refined sensitive face. It is the portrait of a fastidious artist scrutinizing a picture with analytical gaze. The Persian beauty of flowing lines and tenuous fabric has been almost usurped by the Venetian beauty of rich texture and voluminous material. The prodigal richness of the thick brocade is emphasized by the translucency of the austere face and the hands. The thickness of the velvet is further brought out by the light cambric of handkerchief and turban. For huge though the turban is, it is not heavy, and with Persian virtuosity the painter has given rotundity to its folds without shading.

The Shaman or Wizard of the proto-historic Orient, his vocation, his reputation, his strange psychosis, his claim to thaumaturgic powers, and his place in the social structure of his community, are not all these written in the chronicles of the. Works of de Groot and Shirokogaroff ?

Digests of law collected from all the races of the Malay archipelago fill many printed volumes. In the Malay peninsula they are of three main types. There are digests and tribal sayings that embody the mild indigenous matriarchal law of agricultural clans, the 'adat perpateh or Law of Prime Ministers, found among the Minangkabaus of Sumatra and their colonists in Negri Sembilan. There are digests of patriarchal law deterrent to criminals, the 'adat Temenggong or Law of the Minister for War and Police, evolved for the mixed population of ports, law introduced largely from India along with commerce by traders and adventurers, at first Hindu and later Muslim. (This second type of law may be further divided into general digests of constitutional criminal and civil; law, full of relics of indigenous custom and borrowings from the period of Hindu influence but modelled on text-books of Muslim canon law and containing many of its provisions; secondly, digests of port rules adopted by countries like Acheh and Kedah from regulations of the kind India knew from the days of Chandra Gupta to the time of the Great Moguls; and, thirdly, digests of maritime law compiled, it is said, for Bugis trading vessels.) The last of the main types requires no comment, being Malay translations of orthodox Muslim works of the school of Shafi'i, especially treatises on the law of marriage, divorce, and the legitimacy of children, the only branch of Muslim canon law that Malays have adopted practically unchanged.

The astronomical theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) had similar difficulties in winning recognition and acceptance by the contemporary astronomers in China as it had in Europe. The conflict of the traditional astronomies of both cultures, the contrast between the cosmologico-philosophical ideas established during many centuries and the new theory of the solar system, all that was a basis not only for scientific but also for religious disagreement. The conservative attitude of the Church, rigorously interpreted to the disadvantage of the Copernican theory, went with the Christian missionaries to China.

In the Nights the instrument of music is generally referred to as the ālat al-ṭarab or ālat al-malāhī. The types mentioned are fairly considerable, although in most instances the mere name occurs. In the case of the 'ūd (lute), however, certain subsidiary details occur incidentally which are of value.

Though Ibn Bājjah (Avempace) is by common consent one of the representative Arab philosophers, our knowledge of his views has rested on a narrow basis. Carra de Vaux in France and Sarton in the United States stressed that he is little more than a name—though a famous one—and pointed to the desirability of getting to know more of his work. Students had, when Carra de Vaux and Sarton wrote, been confined for knowledge of Ibn Bājjah's writings to the Hebrew extracts from his Tadbīru'l-Mutawaḥḥid, translated into French by Munk eighty years ago and later dealt with by others. Though at least two MSS. were known to exist in Europe no work of Ibn Bājjah had appeared in the original.

Muslim theology was helped in its growth by the disputes of Muslims with Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, philosophers, and with one another. There are many tales of these arguments and they reveal something of the atmosphere of early Islam. Most of them concern heretics.

THE great difficulty of the Tibetan language is the spelling. This may appear strange in a monosyllabic language, but is due to there being five Prefixes (sngön-jug), ga, da, ba, ma, ha, and four Head-Letters (Go Yig), ra, la, sa, which also precede the principal letter, and one subscribed letter, wa, which follows it, which are none of them sounded; and also that certain combinations of letters are pronounced differently to their spelling, namely the principal letters pa and ba followed by ya are pronounced as cha; most of the principal letters when followed by raare pronounced as ṭa or ḍa; and za followed by la is pronounced as ḍa.