Islamicists interested in Sufism have benefited from a growing number of worthwhile publications in recent years. Studies of South Asian Sufism in particular have broadened scholarly horizons by increasing the range of materials with which to reconstruct a complex history. One aspect of the history of Sufism that has been getting significant attention in various contexts lately is the role of authority in the person of the shaykh. Arthur Buehler offers in his study of South Asia's Naqshbandis something of a parallel to what Vincent Cornell has produced in his work on the role of the shaykh among North Africa's Shadhilis. He argues that Naqshbandi Sufism has witnessed an important shift in the role of the shaykh, from one of hands-on mystical tutelage to one of intercession. Buehler sets his chief argument in the context of evidence that major transformations occurred in the nature of Sufi spiritual authority beginning in the 9th through 11th centuries. In his first two chapters, Buehler lays out the general historical background. Before Sufism had been fully institutionalized into discrete orders, the “teaching shaykh” (shaykh at-ta⊂l―im) instructed all comers in the growing body of Sufi tradition. Imparting the wisdom of already legendary characters, they equipped their students with a working knowledge of the essentials of Sufism. They and their pupils were often quite mobile, and the teacher-student relationship remained relatively informal and distant. Beginning in the late 9th century, that relationship began to change. Over the next 200 years or so, a new kind of shaykh emerged as the normative type of Sufi authority. From a fixed abode, the “directing shaykh” (shaykh al-tarbiyya) provided increasingly proprietary instruction on the actual pursuit of the spiritual path to a select few disciples who pledged their sole allegiance to one spiritual guide. Now the shaykh imparted not merely generalized instructions on spiritual etiquette, but also soul-challenging advice and do-it-or-depart requirements for advancement on the mystical path. Regarded as virtually infallible, the directing shaykh initiated followers into a lineage, bestowed the khirqa, and generally exercised total authority over the disciple's daily affairs.

In the encyclopedic poetry of one of Islam's most prominent mystics, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207-73), one can discover a great deal about the main lines of classical Islamic cosmology and psychology. Conceiving of all of creation as a mirror with two sides, both of which have their reflective values, Rūmī describes both the macrocosm and the microcosm as theaters of divine revelation. In the end, one must come to know God's reflection in the intimacy of the solitary heart; but the cosmos will do for a start. Through his classic understandings of space, time, causality, the evolution of consciousness, and the attractive power of like beings in creation, Rūmī tells of Creation's potential for making known the Creator. And in his images of body, spirit, intellect, and heart, the poet limns the outlines of the essentially human. In the process, he proceeds from macrocosm to microcosm and back; for just as the heart of the individual is the locus of God's reflection in the person, His prophets are as Heart to the Body of the cosmos, in their function of revealing the divine presence and word.

The sea is unquestionably the most powerful dynamic agent on the surface of the globe, and its effects are deeply imprinted on the external crust of our planet; but among the sedimentary deposits which are attributed to its action, and among the effects which it has wrought on the surface features of the earth, the attention of geologists has, till within quite recent times, been principally directed to the phenomena which take place in the immediate vicinity of the land. It is incontestable that the action of the sea along coasts and in shallow water has played the largest part in the formation and accumulation of those marine sediments which, so far as we can observe, form the principal strata of the solid crust of the globe; and it has been from an attentive study of the phenomena which take place along the shores of modern seas that we have been able to reconstruct in some degree the conditions under which the marine deposits of ancient times were laid down.

In the Session of 1876, Mr John Murray communicated to this Society a paper on the distribution of volcanic debris over the floor of the ocean, and in it announced the discovery of cosmic dust in deep sea deposits. It was shown that at points, where neither the action of waves, rivers, or currents can transport the debris of continents, volcanic materials play the most important role in the formation of the mineral constituents of the deep sea deposits. It was pointed out that pumice, on account of its structure, was able-to float to great distances, but in time became waterlogged and sank to the bottom, there to decompose. On the other hand, incoherent volcanic matters, ejected in the form of lapilli, sand, and ashes, into the higher regions of the atmosphere, may, ceteris paribus, be conveyed, in consequence of their small dimensions and structure, to greater distances than other mineral particles derived from the continents. The possibility was also admitted that submarine volcanic eruptions might also contribute to the accumulation of those silicates and pyrogenous minerals and rocks, whose microscopic characters and distribution at the bottom of the sea we shall presently point out.