son of Aaron, and brother to Abihu. He offered incense to the Lord with strange fire, that is, with common fire, and not with that which had been miraculously lighted upon the altar of burnt-offerings. Therefore, he was slain by the Lord, together with his brother Abihu, Lev. x, 1, &c.

NADIR SHAH. See Persia.

NADIYÁ, or Nuddea, a district in the lieutenantgovernorship of Bengal, lying between 22° 52' 33'' and 24° 1Γ N. lat., and between 88° 11' and 89° 24' 41" E. long., bounded on the N. by Râjshâhi, on the E. by Pabnd and Jessor, on the S. by the 24 Parganâs, and on the W. by Hιigli, Bardwân, Birbhùm, and Murshidàbâd districts, with an area of 3404 square miles. It is emphatically a district of great rivers. Standing at the head of the Gangetic delta, its alluvial surface, though still liable to periodical inundation, has been raised by ancient deposits of silt sufficiently high to be permanent dry land. Along the entire northeastern boundary flows the wide stream of the Padma or Ganges; and all the remaining rivers of the district are offshoots of the great river. The Bhâgirathi on the eastern border, and the Jalangi and the Matabhanga meandering through the centre of the district, are the chief of these offshoots, and are called distinctively the “Nadiyâ rivers.” But the whole surface of the country is interlaced with a network of minor streams, communicating with one another by side channels. All the rivers are navigable in the rainy season for boats of the largest burthen, but during the rest of the year they dwindle down to shallow streams, with dangerous sandbanks and bars.

In former times the Nadiya rivers afforded the regular means of communication between the upper valley of the Ganges and the seaboard; and much of the trade of the district still comes down to Calcutta by this route during the height of the rainy season. But the liues of the East Indian and Eastern Bengal Railways, with the main stream of the Ganges and the Sundarbans route, now carry by far the larger portion of the traffic....

NADÍM. Abulfaraj ibn Ishâk of Baghdad, known as Ibn abi Ya'kùb al-Nadim (ob. 995 a.d.), is the author of one of the most interesting works in Arabic literature, the Fihrist, or “list of the books of all nations that were to be found in Arabic,” with notices of the authors and other particulars, carried down to the year 377 a.h. (987-88 A.D.). A note in the Leyden MS. places the death of the author eight years later. Of his life we know nothing; the name Nadim belonged to a distinguished family of Persian origin. The oldest Arabic scholars, of whose works comparatively little has been preserved to us, had a much wider range of interest than their successors. Even then Islam and the Korân were the centre of all study; but curiosity was not limited by religious scruples; men were eager to know the wisdom and the literature of all nations and sects; the free thought which was afterwards so sternly suppressed in the reaction of orthodoxy towards the close of the 9th century lifted men above narrow prejudices. The work of Al-Nadim gives us a complete picture of the most active intellectual period of the Arab empire. He traces the rise and growth of philology and belles-lettres, of theology, orthodox and heretical, of law and history, of mathematics and astronomy, of medicine and alchemy; he does not despise the histories of knights errant, the fables of Kalila and Dinina, the facetiae of the “boon companions,” the works of magic and divination. But to us no part of his work is more interesting than his account of the beliefs of sects and peoples beyond Islâni. Here, fortunately, still more than in other parts of his work, he goes beyond the functions of the mere cataloguer; he tells what he learned of China from a Christian missionary of Najrân, of India from a ...