nounced it again and again; but, before such arguments can influence the masses, they must cease to seek their paradise in the clouds and their authorities in Palestine.
In the general diffusion of knowledge, only the newspaper-educated natives of our Northeastern cities can compare with the Saracens of the thirteenth century. Under her last caliphs, Cordova alone had fourteen lyceums and nine hundred and fifty primary schools; the transcription of the ancient classics employed an army of copyists, and the provincial governors vied in patronizing men of letters. From Leon to Granada every hamlet had its own library, and the lord of every castle a private cabinet of curios or an astronomical observatory. But during the next two centuries a horde of ecclesiastic Vandals marched in the wake of the Christian armies, and special commissioners of the Casa Santa traveled from place to place, burning Unitarians and destroying Arabian manuscripts.
What literary treasures may have perished in that way! The Spanish Moriscoes, the last free and manly nation of the Old World, succumbed to the hirelings of the Holy Inquisition; but Providence generally remedies a calamity of that sort, and the fall of Granada coincided with the discovery of a New World.
A Maori Cosmogony.—Richard Oberländer, in his "Strange Peoples," gives the following as a cosmogony of the New-Zealanders: Maui was a hero who performed as wonderful labors as the Grecian Heracles. He was not only the inventor of the arts of making boats and building houses and the like, but he appointed the paths of the sun and the moon, and was the creator of the earth, which he fished out of the sea in this way: He said one day to his five brothers, who were devoted fishermen, that he would go with them and catch so large a fish that they would not be able to hold him. Now, because they knew what an enchanter he was, and were afraid of his art, they were not willing to take him in the boat with them. Nevertheless, Maui went with them. He changed himself into a bird, flew into the canoe, and did not make himself known till they had got into the open sea. When they had got far out into the sea, Maui wanted to fish; he had a precious fish-hook with him, which he had made out of his grandfather's jaw-bone; but his brothers, to keep him from fishing, refused to give him any bait. Then Maui beat his face till his nose bled, and soaked some tow that he found in the canoe with the blood. That was the bait. Maui threw out his hook, and it was not long before he had a bite, with a tug that made the brothers afraid the boat would be upset. So they cried out, "Let go, Maui!" "Maui never lets go of what he holds," was the answer, and it has become a proverb with the Maoris. He pulled and pulled at the line till he pulled up a land. "Ranga whenna!" exclaimed the brothers, "the fish is a land!" Maui asked them if they knew the name of the fish, and, when they said no, he told them "Haha whenna" (the looked-for land.) After the fish was pulled up, the brothers hastened to divide it among themselves; they pulled and tore in every direction; hence come the inequalities of the island. The canoe was stranded by the rising of the land, and the Maoris say now that it lies on the top of Mount Ikaurangi, near the eastern cape of the island, where Maui is also buried. After this story, the northern island of New Zealand is called Ahi na Maui (the fish of Maui).
"They sow not, they reap not, they trust in Providence, and honor you by sharing the fruits of your worldly industry," is the gist of St. Francis of Assisi's argument in favor of the mendicant friars. The Hindoos are consistent
