UGANDA JOURNAL.


motif qui a fait donner a ces months le nom de la Lune, les influences 6videntes
et remarquables qu'y excercent les phases lunaires, et les opinions 6mises sur ce
point par les philosophes, par les dualistes manichdens, etc.,"

 Masudi is often called the "Herodotus of the Arabs", on account of the
digressive nature of his writings and the wide range of his travels. The com-
parison between the two cannot with justice be carried much further than this.
Some fifteen centuries separate them, and the Moslem scholar of tenth century
Baghdad was a very sophisticated person compared with Herodotus and very
mfch better informed. Masudi himself travelled as far as China and the learned
men of his time studied the philosophy and science of Greece and India.

 One would eagerly digress upon the sources of his information, but in the
 absence of a library and even of a copy of the Muruju 'dhdhahab,-a previous
 work, of which the Kitabu 'ttanbih is an abridgement,-let it suffice to say that
 Masudi in the course of his travels covered Egypt, Madagascar and Zanzibar.
 Arab geography is a study in itself and one hesitates to advance without the
 guiding lights of the many authorities ancient and modern.

 One notes, however:-
 A resemblance between this passage and Herodotus' description, and the
obvious application of Masudi's description to the Uganda part of the Nile
system,-the two lakes leading into a third other from which, (in the second
iqlim, i.e. in the latitude of India) the Egyptian Nile flows.

 ALSO: The confident exactitude with which he gives his distances and lati-
tudes. Whitaker gives the Nile's length as 4000 miles, but as I do not know
the length of the "mil" Masudi and the Arabs used it must be left to one
better informed to comment on his accuracy. The name derives from the Roman
mile of a thousand double paces.

 In another passage Masudi shews himself fully aware that the Nile floods
are caused by the rains in the Mountains of the Moon, a theory which Herodotus,
as far as.I can recollect, accepts with some hesitation.

 The passage throws an interesting light on the scope of Arab knowledge
at a time when Europe was in the dark ages,-the days of Athelstan and the
reconquest of the Danelaw in England,-and many years before the source of
the Nile became a matter of speculation in Europe again.

 The last words quoted are tantalizing; it would be interesting to know why
the mountains were called the Mountains of the Moon, and what the "influences
6videntes et remarquables" are supposed to consist of, not to mention the
opinions of the philosophers and Manichaean dualists on a point which can
hardly have been much within the experience of the latter at any rate,