No. 1 Islamic law is a phenomenon so different from all other forms of law – notwithstanding, of course, a considerable and inevitable number of coincidences with one or the other of them as far as subject matter and positive enactment are concerned – that its study is indispensable in order to appreciate adequately the full range of possible legal phenomena.
No. 2 Both Jewish law and canon law are more uniform that Islamic law. Though historically there is a discernible break between Jewish law of the sovereign state of ancient Israel and of the Diaspora (the dispersion of Jewish people after the conquest of Israel), the spirit of the legal matter in later parts of the Old Testament is very close to that of the Talmud, one of the primary codifications of Jewish law in the Diaspora.
No. 3 Islam, on the other hand, represented a radical breakaway from the Arab paganism that preceded it; Islamic law is the result of an examination, from a religious angle, of legal subject matter that was far from uniform, comprising as it did the various components of the laws of pre-Islamic Arabia and numerous legal elements taken over from the non-Arab peoples of the conquered territories.
No. 4 One such novel idea is that of ing into the chromosomes of plants discrete genes that are not a part of the plants’ natural constitution: specifically, the idea of ing into nonleguminous plants the genes, if they can be identified and isolated, that fit the leguminous plants to be hosts for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Hence, that intensified research on legumes.
No. 5 It is one of nature’s great ironies that the availability of nitrogen in the soil frequently sets an upper limit on plant growth even though the plants’ leaves are bathed in a sea of nitrogen gas.
No. 6 Unless they succeed, the yield gains of the Green Revolution will be largely lost even if the genes in legumes that equip those plants to enter into a symbiosis with nitrogen fixers are identified and isolated, and even if the transfer of those gene complexes, once they are found, becomes possible.
No. 7 Its subject (to use Maynard Mack’s categories) is “life-as-spectacle,” for readers, diverted by its various incidents, observe its hero Odysseus primarily from without; the tragic Iliad, however, presents “life-as-experience”: readers are asked to identify with the mind of Achilles, whose motivations render him a not particularly likable hero.
No. 8 Most striking among the many asymmetries evident in an adult flatfish is eye placement: before maturity one eye migrates, so that in an adult flatfish both eyes are on the same side of the head.
No. 9 A critique of the Handlins’ interpretation of why legal slavery did not appear until the 1660s suggests that assumptions about the relation between slavery and racial prejudice should be reexamined, and that explanations for different treatment of Black slaves in North and South America should be expanded.
No. 10 The best evidence for the layered mantle thesis is the well-established fact that volcanic rocks found on oceanic islands, islands believed to result from mantle plumes arising from the lower mantle, are composed of material fundamentally different from that of the midocean ridge system, whose source, most geologists contend, is the upper mantle.