Nevertheless, we welcome Mr. Baillie's publication as a valuable
addition to juridical and even to general literature. The translation,
though not by any means free from defects, is the best specimen of
a really good Mahometan law-book that has yet been published. The
defects to which we allude are twofold. In the first place, though Mr.
Baillie mentions that in the original the name of the treatise from
which it is taken is appended to every excerpt, he has not in his
translation given those references. His work is not therefore what
the original is, a Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists--a
succedaneum for their complete works--an illustration of Arabic legal
literature. Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of
the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical
phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the
selection of his English terms. It has occurred to us that he would
have succeeded better in rendering the exact meaning of his originals,
had he availed himself more of technical phrases of the Roman law
which are familiar to all European jurists. Is does not occur to
us that he would by doing so have been in danger of Romanizing the
Mahometan to an extent that might mislead. Mill, in his History of
British India, has noticed how closely the classification of the
Mahometan approaches to that of the Roman jurists. An attentive
perusal of Mr. Baillie's volume has convinced us that the analogy in
the substance is quite as strong as in the arrangements. This fact
seems susceptible of being accounted for on historical grounds.
Mahometanism is in fact a sect or heresy of Christianity. The views
and sentiments, the aggregate of which make up the body of Christian
opinion, are not all of Jewish or Christian origin. They are the moral
creed of societies whose opinions and civilization have been derived
in part from other sources. The philosophy of Greece and the law of