Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 1.djvu/33

 forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking originality, and which makes it a perfect expositor of the mediæval Moslem mind. Explanatory notes did not enter into Mr. Payne's plan. They do into mine: I can hardly imagine The Nights being read to any profit by men of the West without commentary. My annotations avoid only one subject, parallels of European folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting, would over-swell the bulk of a book whose speciality is anthropology. The accidents of my life, it may be said without undue presumption, my long dealings with Arabs and other Mohammedans, and my familiarity not only with their idiom but with their turn of thought, and with that racial individuality which baffles description, have given me certain advantages over the average student, however deeply he may have studied. These volumes, moreover, afford me a long-sought opportunity of noticing practices and customs which interest all mankind and which "Society" will not hear mentioned. Grote the historian, and Thackeray the novelist, both lamented that the A bégueulerie of their countrymen condemned them to keep silence where publicity was required; and that they could not even claim the partial licence of a Fielding and a Smollett. Hence a score of years ago I lent my best help to the late Dr. James Hunt in founding the Anthropological Society, whose presidential chair I first occupied (pp. 2-4 Anthropologia; London, Ballière, vol. i., No. 1, 1873). My motive was to supply travellers with an organ which would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscript, and print their curious information on social and sexual matters out of place in the popular book intended for the Nipptisch, and indeed better kept from public view. But, hardly had we begun when " Respectability," that whited sepulchre full of all uncleanness, rose up against us. "Propriety" cried us down with her brazen blatant voice, and the weak-kneed brethren fell away. Yet the organ was much wanted and is wanted still. All now known barbarous tribes in Inner Africa, America and Australia, whose instincts have not been overlaid by reason, have a ceremony which they call "making men." As soon as the boy shows proofs of puberty, he and his coevals are taken in hand by the mediciner