priestly tuition, they spend months in the "bush," enduring
hardships and tortures which impress the memory till they have
mastered the "theorick and practick" of social and sexual
relations. Amongst the civilised this fruit of the knowledge tree
must be bought at the price of the bitterest experience, and the
consequences of ignorance are peculiarly cruel. Here, then, I
find at last an opportunity of noticing in explanatory notes many
details of the text which would escape the reader's observation,
and I am confident that they will form a repertory of Eastern
knowledge in its esoteric phase. The student who adds the notes
of Lane ("Arabian Society," etc., before quoted) to mine will
know as much of the Moslem East and more than many Europeans who
have spent half their lives in Orient lands. For facility of
reference an index of anthropological notes is appended to each
volume.

The reader will kindly bear with the following technical details.
Steinhaeuser and I began and ended our work with the first Bulak
("Bul.") Edition printed at the port of Cairo in A.H. 1251 = A.D.
1835. But when preparing my MSS. for print I found the text
incomplete, many of the stories being given in epitome and not a
few ruthlessly mutilated with head or feet wanting. Like most
Eastern scribes the Editor could not refrain from "improvements,"
which only debased the book; and his sole title to excuse is that
the second Bulak Edition (4 vols. A.H. 1279 = A.D. 1863), despite
its being "revised and corrected by Sheik Mahommed Qotch Al-
Adewi," is even worse; and the same may be said of the Cairo
Edit. (4 vols. A.H. 1297 = A. D. 1881). The Calcutta ("Calc.")
Edition, with ten lines of Persian preface by the Editor, Ahmed
al-Shirwani (A.D. 1814), was cut short at the end of the first