resented him with a quantity of wheat, taken from that
fatal tree[113] for which he had defied the wrath of his Creator, with
the information that it was to be for food to him and to his children.
At the same time he was directed to set it in the earth, and afterwards
to grind it into flour. Adam obeyed, for it was part of his penalty that
he should toil for sustenance; and the same day the corn sprang up and
arrived at maturity, thus affording him an immediate resource against
the evils of hunger and famine. For the benevolent archangel did not
quit him until he had farther taught him how to construct a mill on the
side of the mountain, to grind his corn, and also how to convert the
flour into dough and bake it into bread.

[112] The number Forty occurs very frequently in the Bible
(especially the Old Testament) in connection with
important events, and also in Asiatic tales. It is, in
fact, regarded with peculiar veneration alike by Jews
and Muhammedans. See notes to my _Group of Eastern
Romances and Stories_ (1889), pp. 140 and 456.

[113] The "fruit of the forbidden tree" was not an apple, as
we Westerns fondly believe, but _wheat_, say the Muslim
doctors.

With regard to the forlorn associate of his guilt, from whom a long and
painful separation constituted another article in the punishment of his
disobedience, it is briefly related that, experiencing also for the
first time the craving of hunger, she instinctively dipped her hand into
the sea and brought out a fish, and laying it on a rock in the sun, thus
prepared her first meal in this her state of despair and destitution.

Adam continued to deplore his guilt on the mountain for a period of one
hundred years, and it is said that from his tears, with which he
moistened the earth during this interval of remorse, there grew up that
useful variety of plants and herbs which in after times by their
medicinal qualities served to alleviate the afflictions of the human
race; and to this circumstance is to be ascribed the fact that the most
useful drugs in the _materia medica_ continue to this day to be supplied
from the peninsula of India and the adjoining islands. The angel Gabriel
had now tamed the wild ox of the field, and Allah himself had discovered
to Adam in the caverns of the same mountain that most important of
minerals, iron, which he soon learned to fashion into a variety of
articles necessary to t