I may add that in Northern Africa jackal’s gall, like jackal’s grape (_Solanum nigrum_ = black nightshade), ass’s milk and melted camel-hump, is used aphrodisiacally as an unguent by both sexes. See p. 239, etc. of Le Jardin parfumé du Cheikh Nefzaoui, of whom more presently.
Some years ago I was asked by my old landlady if ever in the course of my travels I had come across Captain Gulliver.
In “The Adventurer” quoted by Mr. Heron, “Translator’s Preface to the Arabian Tales of Chaves and Cazotte.”
“Life in a Levantine Family” chapt. xi. Since the able author found his “family” firmly believing in The Nights, much has been changed in Alexandria; but the faith in Jinn and Ifrit, ghost and vampire is lively as ever.
The name dates from the second century A.H. or before A.D. 815.
Because Sí = thirty and Murgh = bird. In McClenachan’s Addendum to Mackay’s Encyclopædia of Freemasonry we find the following definition: “Simorgh. A monstrous griffin, guardian of the Persian mysteries.”
For a poor and inadequate description of the festivals commemorating this “Architect of the Gods” see vol. iii. 177, “View of the History etc. of the Hindus” by the learned Dr. Ward, who could see in them only the “low and sordid nature of idolatry.” But we can hardly expect better things from a missionary in 1822, when no one took the trouble to understand what “idolatry” means.
Rawlinson (ii. 491) on Herod. iii. c. 102. Nearchus saw the skins of these formicæ Indicæ, by some rationalists explained as “jackals,” whose stature corresponds with the text, and by others as “pengolens” or ant-eaters (_manis pentedactyla_). The learned Sanskritist, H. H. Wilson, quotes the name Pippilika = ant-gold, given by the people of Little Thibet to the precious dust thrown up in the emmet heaps.
A writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ (July, ’86), of whom more presently, suggests that The Nights assumed essentially their present shape during the general revival of letters, arts and requirements which accompanied the Kurdish and Tartar irruptions into the Nile Valley, a golden age which embraced the whole of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and ended with the Ottoman Conquest in A.D. 1527.
Let us humbly hope not again to hear of the golden prime of