in him the most signal artifices of imposture, the grossest ignorance, and the greatest imprudence." Others have found it significant that in the Koran, there is no single chapter which has any connection with another, and in the course of a single sura, the ideas are often interrupted. But men of genius who have been subject to epilepsy in one form or another are by no means rare, and it is unsafe to base any theory on the latent forms of neurosis in genius. Consider Mozart, Paginini, Pascal, Handel, Flaubert, Petrarch, Dr. Johnson, Buffon, Caesar. Names of men similarly afflicted come thick and fast. So to the man's works.
The father of the lad died before his child's birth and his mother lived until Mahomet was seven years old. The grandfather, Abd-al-Muttalib, took charge of the orphan, but he too died a year later, upon which the boy was adopted by an uncle, Abu-Talib. The uncle was a poor man, and the boy had little or no education, spending the days herding sheep and tending camels. So things went quite uninterestingly until Mahomet was twenty-six years of age, when a wealthy widow named Khadija, fifteen years his senior, fell in love with the young man, and they were married. She bore him five children, (see appendix) was a sensible, business-like kind of woman who did not understand him perhaps, but nevertheless aided her strange husband, and to her Mahomet owed quite as much in the way of advancement and opportunity as Napoleon owed to his first wife. Certainly, in the days of Mahomet as in our own time, wealth made all the difference, and
