The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-10-25

words as well as a1phabets How shall ehe dwelier in some low lying atoll know the word mountain? How write Lamb Of God for Esquimaux, who know no lambs? Little seal" the translator had to put it at last.
 Bad to eat was as near as the trans iator into Mosquito could get to sin.
 Nice smell had to serve as native Aus uaIlan for frankincense. In Uganda the translator had to wait five years be- lore he could catch a word that meant plague. Then one day he heard a man DeWailing the influx of rats, such a
 olpebu' they were. Out came the note oook' down went the long sought word
 How translate the Gospel into lan- suage that has no words for city, mar rage, wheat, barley; in which pig, rat and dog exhaust the geological terms; in which the word for five is "my hand" Tor Six my hand and one," and so on.
 Ihen the revision. An American trans lated the Gospel of Matthew into Mlcmao Tor the Nova Scotian Indians After all his long toll and faithful proofreading up from the south came the printed word and he read the puzzling sentence, "A pair oof suowshoes shall rise up against pair of snowshoes shall rise up against had changed nation into pair of snow shoes.'
 But if for some races the translator had to create a written language, for others he worked in fear of a criticism more learned than his own The story or the Arabic Bible, the greatest of mod ern translations and the greatest of all Bibles in non-Christian tongue, re- minds one of Aldus and his Venice print shop.
 The first task was to create a typo which should pass muster with the fas- tdious and artistic Mohammedan schol- ars. who to this day prefer manuscript books to printed volumes. Including vowel points 1,S00 different types are necessary to print an Arabic alphabet
 The creation of the steel punches with which to strike the matrices to cast the type in form to disarm all criticism and their eventual casting at Leipsic, whither they were transported overland from Syria, took five years. The whole work proceeded at the same time. Every proof was corrected by the one hundred leading authorities in the world, Syrian, Arabian, American and European.
 No Occidental can conceive the com plexity of page of Arabic proof, or the sight destroying labor of reading 1t. Men grew gray and lost their eyesight putting the work into type. From the moment of It's inception to that of it's final electrotyping in ten different forms 76 years passed, and the American Bible society had spent s1oOOOO on the work.
 The result Is the standard Arabic Bible which circulates all along the north African coast, across the Sahara to Tim bul1tu. and south to Niger and Mombasa. It is called for at the Cape of Good Hope, in Persia, Central Asia, India, China, Malaysia, the Philippines. Yucatan, and Brazil. Imported from Beirut it is the Bible used by syrians in New York and Chicago.
 One of the heroic tales of the societys annals is that of Bishop Schereschewsky, who, stricken with paralysis, pounded out a Chinese translation with two fin- gers on the typewriter. For 20 years preceding his death he was practically confined to an arm chair. During this time he translated the whole Bible from the original Creek and Hebrew into the Easy Wenl dialect of China.
 He was unable to speak plainly enough to be understood by Chinese scribe. He could not hold pen, having only one finger on each hand under control. So he made the translation with these two fingers on the typewriter, and 1t was then copied by hand into the Easy Wenli dia- lect by Chinese woman, Mrs. Wei His original typewritten manuscript is now preserved in the Lenox Library as a monument of one of the most stupendous literary undertakings ever made.
 In s1 years of existence the society distributed S0.420. .3S2 copies of the Bible. Last year it distributed 100000. These Bibles are paid for in queer circulating medium sometimes.
 Within it's history the society has ac- oepted dried cocoanutS salt fish, knives, spoons. rugs, beads, eowrie shells, grass