prophetic call, did not result from the visit of an angel bringing him Divine revelations, as is believed by the Mohammedans, but were the natural outcome of a diseased state of health, and of an abnormal physical constitution, dating back to the earliest period of his life. Just as in his mature age he remained conscious of the sensations he felt during his cataleptic fits, so also in the instance of his childhood, related by his Bedouin nurse and himself, he was able to describe the subjective play of a disordered imagination during the paroxysm, as if it had been an objective reality. The disorder from which he suffered is supposed by his medical biographer Sprenger to have been hysteria muscularis, and although its attacks closely resembled common epileptic fits, yet they also differed from them, inasmuch as he retained a recollection of the workings of his mind during the paroxysms, which is not the case in ordinary epilepsy. Mohammed's hysterical sensations and visionary fantasies obviously were involuntary, and yet proceeded only from within his own psychical world, just as our ordinary dreams come involuntarily, but are nevertheless originated by ourselves. The nature of both phenomena is one purely subjective.

When Mohammed was six years old, his mother took him with her on a visit to their relatives in Medina. His great-grandmother Salma belonging to the powerful family of the Beni Adi, and his father Abd Allah having died, and lying buried, amongst them, the little orphan was naturally remembered with interest by a number of friends and connections in Medina. The widowed Amina, on her part, whose entire hope centred in the one child, was equally disposed to keep up and refresh that interest amongst her, son's kindred in the sister-city, which was at once his father's last resting-place and his grandfather's birthplace. They remained a whole month with the Beni Adi, living in the very house where Abd Allah had died; and, when many years later Medina opened her gates to the fugitive Prophet, he said that he could still recollect several scenes of this early visit. The short stay in the feverish climate of Medina seems to have been too much for his mother's delicate health; for she died during their return journey, before they reached Mecca. Such a tragic event was eminently calculated to intensify

the sympathy for the now fatherless and motherless orphan amongst his kinsmen and well-wishers in Medina; and it is but natural to imagine that they always made it a point to look after and befriend him, whenever they performed their pilgrimage to the shrine of Mecca, which was situated close to his grandfather's dwelling-house. This family relationship and its mutual cultivation prepared the way for, and doubtless first suggested the idea of, Mohammed's later emigration to Medina. It also supplies an easy explanation of the early conversion of a number of Medinites to Islam.

After Amina's death, her orphan son passed to the sole guardianship of his aged grandfather, the revered and influential Abdu-l-Mottaleb, who seems to have doted upon him with all the fondness and over-indulgence so often met with in grandparents towards their grandchildren, and who, before he died, urgently commended him to the care of Abu Talib, the child's paternal uncle. The biographers say that Abu Talib's love for his ward was such that he preferred him to his own children, and would never allow a meal to be begun until he was present. It requires no stretch of imagination to understand how such unusual deference to a young lad, could hardly fail to engender in his extremely susceptible mind strong notions about his own peculiar importance, dignity, and destiny; and, as fortune-tellers were then in great repute amongst the Meccans, it could easily be conceived that, for a trifle, those notions were fostered by their prognostications, even if Mohammedan history did not make express mention of the subject. But Ibn Ishak writes thus: 'A fortune-teller of the tribe Sihb often came to Mecca and prophesied to the lads taken to him by the Koreishites. On Abu Talib one day coming with some, the fortune-teller specially noticed the Apostle of God; but his attention was just then occupied with something else. As soon as he had finished, he again inquired after him, and desired that he should be brought. Abu Talib, suspecting those pressing solicitations, concealed him, whereupon the soothsayer called out, "Woe unto you! bring me that lad again whom I have just seen: by Allah, he will one day occupy a high position!"'

Early travelling with the far-famed mercantile caravans