48 Literary Intelligence. [No. 1. 



we may imagine that he speaks very lightly of his predecessors. 

 Ahii 'abd Allah Jobhany, he says was Wazyr of the Amyr of Kho- 

 rasan, and a good astronomer ; he gathered much information, among 

 other things, regarding Indian mythology, but his book, he thinks, is 

 too speculative and impractical. The principal object of Abu zayd 

 Balkhy was to give maps and to this end he divided the globe into 

 twenty parts, but the descriptions are, in his estimation, not fall 

 enough, as he had seen very little of the world. The same remark 

 applies to Tan-al-Faqyh Hamadany, who enumerates only the large 

 towns. The geographies of Ibn Khordadbah and Ja/utz are much 

 too short. In the whole it must be allowed that Maqdisy's work 

 is by far the best arranged and approaches nearer to our notions 

 of geography than any other : thus after the description of the 

 division and cities of a country he gives, under separate heads, an 

 account of the climate c*jt>», commerce otjlsr 5 , productions which 

 are peculiar to it, uajLa^. as for instance the Adym leather of Zabyd, 

 weights, measures and coins dj&*j <J-£^°, of the dress and habits of 



the inhabitants fj-*>j, of the manner in which towns are supplied 

 with water, and quality of the water *Lx*J| mineral productions cj^U^o 

 of the sights and places okftfigrknage c4^l>*>j ^Umo ? of the political 

 divisions oLj^j of customs and other towns duties and the custom- 

 houses tVej^Jij ^J\j^J\ (this is the most interesting chapter of 

 all) and finally of the distances. Having detailed the merits of 

 the work I must not forget to mention the demerits of the 

 copy. It is about two or three hundred years old and has all the 

 maps. It consists of 236 pp. of 25 lines. But unfortunately the 

 original seems to have been in a bad condition and the copyist had 

 no second copy to supply the deficiencies. In one place nearly a 

 page is left blank with the remark cU^t ^ 1=.^ In other places 

 he would not decipher proper names and either he pointed them 

 as he found them in the original or (and in some few instances) he 

 omitted them altogether. Yet the MS. is in the whole correct and 

 contains all the maps. A copy of so rare and valuable a work is under 

 all circumstances a treasure, and even should another one be found, 

 it would hardly sink in value, because it is not to be supposed that 

 it by itself would be sufficiently complete and correct as to enable 

 a man to edit it, and as a help this copy is extremely important. 



