A literary history of Persia

DOCTORTHE FiHRis'JARO 6Wof the names of the Planets and Fixed Stars the ; composition of theUniverse according to the Ptolemaic system ; Judicial Astrology ;and the instruments and apparatus used by astronomers.13. Music (musiqi), discussed in 3 sections ; including an accountof the various musical instruments and their names, and musicalnotation and terminology.- 14. Mechanics ('ilmtt'l-hiyal ; "the Science of Devices"), in 2sections, including Hydrostatics.15. Alchemy (kimiyd), in 3 sections, including an account of theapparatus, the substances, and the processes used by those whopractice it. III. The Fihrht.The Fihrist t or "Index," of Muhammad b. Ishdq an-Nadimis one of the most remarkable and valuable works in the Arabicof itlanguage which has survived to our days. Manuscriptsare rare, and more or less defective. Fliigel'sedition is basedon two Paris MSS. (of which the more ancient codex containsthe first four of the ten MaqalAt or " Discourses "into which the book is divided, and the more modern, transcribedfor de Slane in Constantinople, presumably from theMSS. numbered 1134 and 1135 in the Kupriilii-z&de' Library,the latter portion of the work, from the fifth section of thefifth discourse onwards) ;two Vienna MSS., both incorrectand incomplete ;the Leyden MS., which contains onlyMaqdlas vii-x ;and1two Leyden fragments.hazarded a conjecture that the work was inSprengerreality aCatalogue rahonne of some large library, but this view isrejected by Brockelmann. 2Be this as itmay, I know of no Arabic book which inspiresme at once with so much admiration for the author's enormouserudition, and so much sadness that sources of knowledge atonce so numerous and so precious as were available when hewrote should, for the most part, have entirely perished. Ofauthors who are known to us only by a few small fragments,1See pp. xvi-xix of the Preface to Fliigel's edition.Gesch. d. arab. Lift., vol. i, p. 147.