100 
The Atheist. 
session of any Englishman, he will probably be 
puzzled ;  this note may enlighten him.  The plate I 
saw — but could not buy — was some 18 inches 
square, nearly as flexible as platinum foil, and con-
tained some 320,000 characters, at a rough esti-
mate.  The 1,000 pounds’ weight seems to me an 
absurd overstatement. 
3.  Refers, in all probability, to the reddening of 
the buttocks.  The Persians supposed the smaller 
capillary blood vessels to be nerves. 
4.  Imam — a leader of prayer.  Muslim have no 
“ priests ” in the sense of paid mediators. 
5.  Mushtari — also Birjis [Persian text] is the 
planet Jupiter.  Most nations seem to attribute a 
blue or violet colour to it ;  for mystical reasons, 
doubtless, but also because (to my eyes at least) it 
actually has that colour. 
6.  I suspect, maugre Mahbub’s head, that this 
is “ writ sarcastic.”  The pompous old dullard must 
have seemed to our lively Abdullah very much as 
Southey did to Byron.  Yet the Eastern is a terrible 
slave to convention, and may perhaps acquiesce in 
Hafiz as the undergraduate of to-day acquiesces in 
Milton. 
7.  The central thought of these two chapters is 
represented in the Buddhist philosophy, per-
haps ;  but in the Hindu practice, certainly.  It is 
true that the Hindu claims the extinction of self in 
Parabrahm (Jivatma in Paramatma) as the pheno-
menon in question ;  but this is clearly a petitio 
principii, since we can always retort that any per-
ception however glorious is less than the brain 
which perceives it.  The Hindu would (idly) retort 
that this perception was not the phenomenon, but 
only one’s very partial and imperfect memory the-
reof.  And the logician would retort — and we 
should soon get quite beyond the limits of a note.