e Stars,' 'the Dawn,' 'the
Night,' etc. Hakim pursued his studies under Kali for twenty years,
with as much pleasure as advantage, and after ascending the throne,
science and art still remained his companions. When his father died,
and he assumed the Government, he led the funeral procession,
surrounded by his Andalusian, Slavonic, and Mograbin body-guard, and
interred the corpse with the greatest pomp in the mausoleum of Rozafa,
and after that accepted the homage of his Viziers, Amirs, Kayids, and
Kadis. Astrologers and poets heralded at Cordova and in the whole of
Andalusia the continuation of the father's prosperous reign by his
son, and spoke the truth this time.

Hakim, who had already as a youth been fond of books, now, when he
became sovereign, fully satisfied this predilection, which had grown
to be a passion. He spared neither trouble nor expense in collecting
in his Merwan palace the rarest and most costly books in every branch
of science from all countries. He sent special commissioners to Egypt,
Syria, Irak, and Persia to purchase books. At Baghdad, Muhammad bin
Turkhan was charged with the business of purchasing books, or getting
them copied, for which purpose he had an establishment of
calligraphers and stenographers; because of some books beautiful, and
of others rapidly made, copies were required. He procured all the
genealogies, all the histories, and all the poems of the Arabs; all
works on law and jurisprudence, on grammar, rhetoric, philosophy,
philology, mathematics, astronomy, arithmetic and geography, composed
in Arabic. Thus the library of the Merwan palace became not only the
richest in Islam, but also the best arranged, by the care which he
bestowed on it. The catalogue consisted of forty-four fascicles, each
of fifty leaves, so that the whole constituted a volume of two
thousand two hundred leaves, two-fifths of which were filled with
titles of poetical works only. In this catalogue the titles of the
books were inserted, with the names of their authors, their descent,
birth-place, the year of their birth and of their decease, in the most
accurate manner, to serve as a model for other libraries, of which
Spain contained so many. This library alone is said to have consisted
of six hundred thousand volumes, a number never surpassed by any
earlier or later libraries in Islam.

To his two brothers, who loved the sciences as ardently as himself,
Hakim entrusted the care of the libraries, and of pu