merely editorial. I owe much to his articles in various Scientific Journals, American, English, and German, and have drawn also from the collections of proverbs, sayings and verses, which appear in the Manual of Palestinean Arabic, Spoer and Haddad. The Poems of Nimr ibn Adwan collected and translated by Dr. H. H. Spoer contain in extensive notes, intimate pictures of Desert life. (Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol 43 also Zeitschrift der Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 66). The transliteration of Arabic phrases has been made, when possible, according to accepted rules, but in a work essentially popular in form, the general reader has been the one considered. He may realise, for example, that the sh in "Shech" is pronounced as in "shawl," and the ch as in "loch," whereas the correct transliteration seh would be merely a perplexity. Moreover, the phrases quoted are mainly in the fellah or bedawy dialect, and not to be judged by the standards of literary language. The phrase "Syrian Arab " is not used as a racial but as a geographical distinction, which moreover is not limited to the post-War significance of that part of the country now in the hands of the French. My personal observations have extended little to the country south of the Dead Sea. However, in cases in which I have quoted travellers in the Arabian Peninsula in support of my own observations, it has always been with the recognition of the fact that, in the case of the nomadic peoples, folklore and tradition know no limitation of place. The work of putting this book together has been the occasional recreation of ten strenuous years; an alleviation to the strain of serious work for the relief of prisoners of many nationalities, largely British; of work for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent; and above all for the relief of many thousands of refugees, Armenian, Turkish and Russian. It has moreover been a solace under imprisonment by Turks, and Germans, and Bolsheviks, always upon the charge of furthering British interests brought against my husband, a citizen of the United States, even before the entrance of America into the War. Our note-books and manuscripts were among the little property we were able to save during two adventurous flights, the one across Asia Minor in a cattle-truck, the other, under conditions far more painful, from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the shelter of Constantinople, when escaping from the Bolsheviks of Azerbeijan. On the eve of leaving the Old World in which certain charac teristics, dear to "the fanatic in things of the Past" are dying or dead, for the New in which they are powerless to be born, I count it a special privilege to take my small share in the duty of recording thoughts, customs and feelings which, in the main regarded as unproductive and therefore useless, are dear to the few who still have idle tears to shed for the days that are no more. A. M. SPOER. Jerusalem 1924. |