Ismaylis, men of property, who come from Surat, but whose country is in the interior of the Peninsula. They sell here corallines, false pearls, China ware, &c. It is well known that they are no true Mahommedans, although they are very strict in the performance of prayers and religious rites, and it is generally supposed that they are Pagans. They live altogether in a large house, where they admit no other lodgers, never bringing any females with them, although twenty or thirty arrive here. every year; and many have been known to live here for ten years without marrying, which is much against the customs of this country. During my stay in the mountains on the North of Mount Libanus in Syria, I got acquainted with the sect of Syrian Ismayles, who likewise profess Mahommedanism, but are well known to be Pagans, and I heard it once said en passant in an evening Society of Christians at Hamah, that the Ismayles have their principal temple in the East Indies, and send every year by way of Baghdad one of their followers with presents to that holy shrine. The Syrian Ismayles practise yearly feasts of Venus, when they mix in nocturnal embraces with their nearest friends, parents, and relations. I should be much obliged to you if you would have the kindness, upon your arrival in India, to make some inquiries as to the seat and religion of these Ismayles, and whether it is known there that they are in relationship with their Syrian brethren. An Indian Ismalee might perhaps be prevailed on to make some disclosures to an Englishman, which a Syrian Ismaylee would never make to an inhabitant of his country; and to get some true information respecting this singular sect would be extremely interesting. This is perhaps the last letter you will ever receive dated from Mekke, and I ought therefore to make it a long one, but I have really nothing to tell you of immediate interest, and the boy comes this moment to ask for the letter. Therefore, farewell, my dear Sir; may your hopes be realized, may your good fortune enable you to provide for your dear family in Indian climes, and may we once meet again both satisfied with the result of past time and labour. Wherever fate carries you, remember, I beg you, an honest Swiss, who reckons himself among the most sincere of your friends. HADJ IBRAHIM. Give my best compliments to Captain Boog, the memory of whose friendly hospitality and conversation will certainly never be forgotten by me, and if you write to me from Bombay, do not fail to give me of his news- -Remember Rennell's Herodotus and Seetzen's fate;-Written in haste, with a reed. These last requests of Mr. Burckhardt regarding the Indian sect of Mussulmans, called Ismayles, the illustration of an interesting portion of Rennell's Herodotus, and an inquiry into Dr. Seetzen's fate, have all been scrupulously executed. They were the requests of a man who possessed an ardour in the pursuit of his objects, which made him in earnest in all that he ever did or said; and they were made to one who, like himself, would have prosecuted such inquiries for their own sake, but who had an additional motive to actuate him, in the friendship which he entertained for the excellent individual who proposed them. The inquiry regarding the Ismayles was not so satisfactorily answered as had been hoped for, since the same mysterious secrecy as Mr. Burckhardt himself complained of in his intercourse with the Ismayles of Mecca, has been found by the inquirer to prevail in an equal degree among those of India. The short notice of them which was drawn up, however, and ransmitted to Mr. Burckhardt, has been preserved. The portion of Rennell's Herodotus, which Mr. Burckhardt was desirous of having illustrated by the person to whom he wrote, was the Chapter on Babylon, of which it was probable this person might have an opportunity of examining the remains. This expectation has been realized, and the observations to which it gave rise have been incorporated with a larger work, and could not well be condensed into a form calculated for a Journal like our own. The inquiry into the fate of Dr. Seetzen, was made at Mokha, where he met his death, and the letter sent to Mr. Burckhardt from thence, containing the result of these inquiries, was transmitted to Vienna for the information of his illustrious patrons, the Emperor Alexander and the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and was afterwards inserted in the Mines De l'Orient, a work published at the Austrian capital. As we possess this notice in its original form, and the Mines De l'Orient is a work not in general circulation, we shall incorporate with it such other notices as we possess of the travels of Dr. Seetzen, and present them to our readers, with the account of the Ismayles, both of which were drawn up from very authentic sources, and may therefore, after having served the purposes of private friendship, be found worthy of being more generally known. To return to the subject of this memoir. He journied from Mecca to Medineh as he intended, and the writer of the Journal quoted, received an exceedingly interesting letter from him while in that city of Arabia, dated from beside the Prophet's Tomb, and descriptive of the town and the holy wonders it contained. The original of this letter has been sent to England, and the copy of it mislaid. From Medineh he intended to have gone by Arabia Petræa, and round the Gulf of Aila, by Eloth and Ezion Gaber, of the Scriptures, into Egypt, but this project was defeated by the appearance of the plague at Medineh, which induced him to come down to Yambo on the sea coast, and em. bark from thence for Suez. After a short stay in Cairo he made his last excursion from thence to Mount Sinai, and the Desert of Wandering, as those wastes around Horeb are generally called. His journal of this interesting tour has reached England. It is interspersed, with a variety of historical notices on the former state of the country, and annexed to it is a memoir of the wanderings of the Israelites on their departure from the land of Pharaoh. From this period Mr. Burckhardt remained in Cairo until the moment of his death, and the writer of the journal had the happiness of meeting him there in the winter of 1815, when his ardent mind was firmly bent on its purpose of traversing the whole continent of Africa, and solving the problems of the outlet of the Niger, and the hidden sources of the Nile, and his hopes of success were so high as to amount to confidence. The Journal enumerates some of the works which Mr. Burckhardt had collected in Arabic literature, and, it is said, that the Association for which he travelled had in their possession a variety of notices on the interior of Africa, with several vocabularies of African languages, collected from the natives who visited Egypt during Mr. Burckhardt's detention in that country. Such are a small part of the labours of this extraordinary person, whose accomplishments and perseverance were such as could not have failed, had he lived, to place him high in the ranks of the most distinguished travellers of this or indeed any age. He has, in fact, left behind him materials which have scarcely ever been equalled by any of his predecessors for the interest and importance of the subjects, the extent of his observations, and for the elegance even of his style, though written in a foreign idiom. The close of Mr. Burckhardt's last work, we understand, is brought down to the 25th March, 1817, when the approaching summer seemed to offer to him the pleasing prospect of a caravan destined to Mourzouk, a route which he had long before decided on as the most likely to conduct towards that point which had now for many years been the principal object of his life. His expressions on this occasion, and which we copy from one of the last letters he was destined to write, cannot be contemplated, at the present moment, without feelings of deep regret. 'I write to Sir Joseph Banks, and repeat to you, that I am in anxious expectation of a caravan from Libya, and I have been long prepared to start on the shortest notice. I shall leave Egypt with more pleasure, because I shall now no more have to regret leaving my journals in a rude state, which would have been the case if I had started last year; and it will afford me no small consolation upon my future travels, to think that, whatVOL. VIII. F ever may be my fate, some profit has, at least hitherto accrued from my pursuits, and that the Association are now in possession of several journals of mine, treating of new and interesting countries.' Such was the eager and lively hope with which he looked forward to joining the departing caravan! but Providence ordained otherwise. On the 5th of October 1817, he was suddenly seized with a dysentery, which, in spite of the attendance of an English Physician, hurried him to an untimely end on the 15th of that month. No words can better depict the last moments of this object of our regret, his ardent mind and his affectionate heart, than those of the letter from the consul-general of Egypt to the secretary of the African Association, alluded to at the beginning of this article. ART IV. Observations on the Medico-Chemical Treatment of Calculous Disorders. By WILLIAM Section 2. On the Production of Calculi in the Kidneys, their Nature and Treatment. HAVING endeavoured in the first Section of this Paper to point out the principal circumstances connected with the early symptoms of gravel, and with their treatment, I shall now endeavour to give some account of what may be called the second stage of the disease, or that in which the materials are voided in an agglutinated form, so as to constitute small calculi, or gravel, limiting the term sand to the earlier stages. It generally happens that the formation of gravel is preceded by one or more attacks of sand, and that concretion is prevented by due precaution in that earlier stage of the disorder; but this is by no means always so, for not unfrequently the first alarm of the patient is occasioned by his voiding a calculus, and that of no small size. |