46 Major Price’s Extracts from the Mualijdt-i-Dard Shekohi. 
Numerous are the benefits which the irrational animal also derives from 
the sense of sight, for by this among animals he distinguishes his natural 
foe, just as by that of smell he discriminates what is noxous among vege- 
tables. It is by the sense of sight, also, that he finds out his friend, and that 
he avoids the fountain, the fire, and the flood, wherever it may be the terror 
of his species. 
To the rational mind, however, the sense of hearing is paramount to all 
the other senses; for the pre-eminence of the reasoning animal, above all 
others, consists in its capacity of acquiring knowledge. The individual 
who does not possess the sense of hearing, can neither arrive at the faculty 
of speech, nor attain to any skill in mathematical science nor in the sacred 
mysteries of theology. Nay, the man that is deaf, and cannot speak, may 
be said to be cut off from the scale of human beings. 
But the sense of smelling is to the rational soul inferior to all the other 
senses ; because from one of the greatest evils of which this is the source, 
we are relieved by any deficiency in that sense; for although we may be 
thus abridged from the enjoyment to be derived from fragrant substances, 
we are, at the same time, in the situation of him who, without the sense of 
smelling, is safe from the annoyance of what is putrid or offensive. 
The sense of hearing is, to irrational animals, or such as are destitute of 
the faculty of speech, the least important of the senses, as that of smelling 
is the most valuable; while in man the sense of smelling is the lowest, and 
that of hearing the most important. The sense of tasting is also most deli- 
cate and acute in the human species ; for do we not observe that, through 
the medium of this latter sense, the appetite of man is attracted to that 
which is most delicious in flavour—that pleasure which, after experiencing 
the cravings of hunger, he is thus qualified to enjoy, in a degree to which 
the irrational or dumb animal must be a stranger. 
But the pre-eminence of the rational over the irrational animal is that 
which he derives from the possession of knowledge, in which the irrational 
can have no participation. Now the mind of the uninformed man, who may 
be considered not far removed from the condition of a brute, must derive 
its knowledge from the intelligent, who may be considered as in the scale 
of angels, through two different channels: one, the sense of hearing, which 
comes under the semblance of speech ; the other, the sense of sight, under 
the semblance of writing, when instruction has been previously conveyed : 
