whole race grows round-shouldered; the gastric region, which ought to be
protected in this climate of extremes, is exposed; the heating of their
heads, night and day, with its hood, cannot but injure their brains; their
hands become weak as those of women, with claw-like movements of the
fingers and an inability to open the palm to the full.

No wonder it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their spiritual
life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and design,
following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are practically
atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome, on cold days,
to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding alms! Man has been
described as a tool-making animal, but the burnous effectually counteracts
that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying vesture, a step in the
direction of fossilification. Will the natives ever realize that the
abolition of this sleeveless and buttonless anachronism is one of the
conditions of their betterment? Have _they_ made the burnous, or
vice-versa? No matter. They came together somehow, and suited one another.

The burnous is the epitome of Arab inefficiency.

They call it simple, but like other things that go by that name, it
defeats it own objects of facilitating the common operations of life. It
is amusing to watch them at their laundry-work. Unless a man stand still
and upright, the end of this garment is continually slipping down from his
shoulders; one of the washerman's hands, therefore, is employed in holding
it in its place; the other grasps a stick upon which he leans while
stamping a war-dance with his feet upon the linen. This is only half the
performance, for a friend, holding up _his_ cloak with one hand, must bend
over and ladle the necessary water upon the linen with the other. Thus two
men are requisitioned to wash a shirt--a hand of one, two feet of the