The third volume of this work begins with the seventh chapter, upon the religion of the Sadikiahs. It is generally known that, during the life of Muham­med, another prophet, called Musaylima, arose in the country of Yamáma, and dared offer to himself in a letter to the former as a partner of his sacred mission, but was treated as a liar. He had however gained a great number of followers, at the head of whom he was defeated and himself slain in a bloody battle against Khaled, a general of the first Khalif, the very same year as Muhammed's death. We find in the Dabistán, what appears less generally known, that Musaylima's sect, far from being entirely crushed after his fall, existed under the name of Sadikias in the seventeenth century of our era, and conformed to a second Faruk, or Koran, to which they attributed a divine origin, and a greater authority than to the first.*

Another account, not frequently met with, is contained in the eighth chapter of the Dabistán, con­cerning Vahed Mahmud, who appeared in the begin­ning of our thirteenth century, and is by his adherents placed above Muhammed and Ali. Among his tenets and opinions is to be remarked that of an ascending refinement or perfection of elemental mat­ter, from the brute or mineral to that of a vegetable form; from this to that of an animal body; and thence progressing to that of Mahmud.* Further, the particular mode of transmigration of souls by means of food into which men, after their death, are changed; such food, in which intelligence and action may reside, becomes continually the aliment and substance of new successive human beings. We were not a little astonished to find these singular opinions agreeing with the information, which Milton's archangel Raphael imparts to Adam, the father of mankind.*

This sort of hylozoism is more expanded in a particular system of cosmogony of the same Vahed,* according to which the materials of the world existed from the very beginning, which signifies from the first appearance of afrad, “rudimental units.” We can never think meanly of this opinion, when we find it coinciding with that of Leibnitz in our seven­teenth century, contemporary of Mohsan Fani. According to the celebrated German philosopher,* there exists already an entirely organical preforma­tion in the seeds of the bodies which are born, and all souls had always pre-existed in some sort of organized body, and shall after death remain united with an organic whole; because in the order of nature souls are not likely to exist entirely separated from any kind of body. In the eighteenth century Bonnet, a great physiologist, maintained,* that all was preformed from the beginning, nothing engen­dered; all organized bodies were pre-existing in a very small compass in the germs, in which souls may also pre-exist, these indestructible germs may sojourn in such or such a body until the moment of its decomposition, then pass, without the least alteration, into another body, from this into a third, and so on; each of the germs incloses another imperishable germ, which will be developed but in a future state of our planet, which is destined to experience a new revolution.

We see here the very same ideas, without any mutual communication, entertained in the East and the West, in ancient and modern times.

Vahed Mahmud combines his cosmogony with periods of 8000 years, eight of which form a great cycle of 64,000 years, at the completion of which the world is renovated. This sect is said to have been widely spread in the world; in Persia the per­secution of Shah Abbas forced them to lie concealed.