48 History of Luminescence 



the fire of al-Hubahib." It is said that al-Hubahib was the name of 

 a man belonging to the tribe of Muharib b. Khasafah, well known 

 for his niggardliness; he used to kindle a faint or weak fire out of 

 fear of guests being drawn to it, and on that account he became 

 proverbial for his fire. Therefore, a little fire which is of no use to 

 anybody and also the fly that flies at night are called " abu-hubahib." 

 The story is very old. The name " hubahib " is also used by an 

 Arab prose writer and theologian, Al-Jahiz, who lived in the second 

 half of the ninth century. In his al-Hayawan, published at Cairo in 

 1324 he tells anecdotes of animals, and wrote: 



Every fire that the eye can see but that has no reality when it is 

 touched is called the fire of Abu Hubahib . . . and another fire similar 

 to the fire of Abu Hubahib is the fire of the Yara'ah; the Yara'ah is a 

 small thing that flies, which, if it flies by day it appears as other things 

 that fly, and if it flies by night it appears as a shooting star or a flying 

 lamp. 



These two words " Hubahib " and " Jara'a " or " Yara'ah " are 

 found in Arab lexicons as words for the firefly. In older Arab litera- 

 ture there was no fine distinction between different kinds of insects 

 and " yara-'ah " was sometimes defined ^ as " a moth that, when it 

 flies by night, no person not knowing it would doubt to be a spark 

 of fire." The verb, " yari'a," means to be cowardly and it is possible 

 that an attribute of cowardliness was implied in the name, as was 

 stinginess in the derivation of hubahib. In the fifteenth and six- 

 teenth centuries in England and France the glowworm was a con- 

 temptuous term applied to persons as an epithet of disdain. 



Arab voyagers to India and China are said to have recorded par- 

 ticularly brilliant displays of phosphorescent seas. According to G. 

 Sarton,^° one of these was an unknown author who traveled to India 

 and China in 851. He wrote: ^^ " That sea— I mean the sea of Har- 

 kand ^^— when its waves have become bigger, appears like a lighted 

 fire." Another was the Persian sea captain, Buzurg ibn Shabriyar 

 al-Ramhurmuzi. In a book of sailor's tales, Kitab a ja ih al-Hind, 

 composed about 953, he said: ^^ " Among the marvelous things of 

 the sea of Fars ^* [we might mention] what the people sometimes 

 see at night when the waves are agitated and knock against each 



'Arabic-English Lexicon of E. W. Lane, 1: 497. 

 i»See G. Sarton. Isis 39: 235, 1948, and 41: 198, 1950. 

 ^^ Translated by M. Jean Sauvaget. 

 ^* Eastern portion of the Bay of Bengal. 



*' The quotation is from the Arabic-French edition (p. 41) by P. A. Van der Lith 

 and L. Marcel Devic. 



^* The Persian Gulf or perhaps the Arabian Sea. 



