After grammar, prosody. That a falling apple should lead Sir Isaac
Newton's thoughts to the problem of gravity is not so remarkable, but
that the laws of prosody should result from an equally capricious
occurrence strikes one as odd. I mention the discoverer's name partly
that schoolboys may remember him, or not, in their prayers. It was
Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad who, at Mecca, had besought Allah to bestow upon him
a science hitherto unknown. Allah being in a complaisant mood, it
followed that not long after, walking in the bazaar, Al-Khalil invented
prosody as he passed a coppersmith's and heard him hammering a basin.
Once started on his career as an inventor, he continued; but a later
discovery cost him dear, for having resolved on devising "a method of
calculation so simple that any servant girl who knew it could go to a
shopkeeper's without incurring the least possible risk of being deceived
by him in the sum she would have to pay, he entered the mosque with his
thoughts occupied on the subject, and he there struck against a pillar,
which his preoccupation hindered him from perceiving. The violence of
the shock threw him on his back, and death was the result."
Al-Khalil used to remark that a man's reason and intelligence reached
perfection when he attained the age of forty, the age of the Prophet
when God sent him forth on his mission; but that they undergo alteration
and diminution when the man reaches sixty, the age in which God took the
Prophet's soul to himself. He said, again, that the intelligence is
clearest at the dawn of day.