in his neighbourhood who had been married to a woman for thirty years, and had two grown-up sons by her, when he began to dislike her, and to wish for a younger wife. He therefore divorced her, and married a girl younger than his eldest son. As he was in Government service, and had a handsome salary, his wife had been used to all the comforts of life. But the small sum of money she received at her divorce was soon expended, and as she was too old to find another husband, and had no relatives to take her in, she was reduced to the most abject poverty and distress, often having nothing to eat to satisfy her hunger. Cases of similar hardship, resulting from heartless divorce, are so common that probably every Muslim reader will remember some from among his own acquaintances or his own neighbourhood. It is not a rare thing that such poor divorced women give themselves up to a life of sin and profligacy in order to avoid starvation. On the other hand, unprincipled men are enabled by this facility of divorce to indulge their illicit appetite to an almost unlimited extent. Not long ago a Turk was pointed out to me who looked about fifty years old only, and yet I was assured by a learned Imam that this man had already divorced seventy wives, and was just then living with two newly-married ones; so that if he married the first time in his twentieth year, he must have divorced at the rate of more than two

wives annually for thirty successive years. How much soever conduct like this may have the form of legitimacy, according to Muhammadan law, yet before a holy God, and even in the eyes of every strictly moral man, it must appear as a life of fornication and sin.

Apart from such cases of extraordinary distress, or legalized excess of sensuality, resulting from the existing laws of Islam respecting divorce, the whole married state, and society in general, cannot fail to be most injuriously and banefully affected. Every Muhammadan who marries does so with the knowledge that at any time he pleases, he can again dissolve that matrimonial tie, without having to dread any check whatever from law, provided he be prepared to pay the sum of money settled upon his wife at the time of marrying. And every woman marrying a Muslim is aware, that if, at any time, she ceases to please her husband, or he would be better pleased with another, he has the legal right to put her away, and take some one else in stead. This state of things deprives matrimony at the outset of the importance and solemnity it has with those who know that they unite for no less a term than life. To the Muhammadan it is not so, but merely a union for as long or as short a time as he himself pleases; and its dissolution is for him not a matter of conscience and morality, but simply a question of money and convenience. This must be productive of evil in a variety of. ways. It is