from some Scythian region to the head of the Gulf of Adria. There seem to have been reports or traditions that tin as well as amber came from the north and an old legend passed current about statues of tin and amber being erected on an island, near the trade-route which all the barbarian tribes respected, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Venice or Trieste. A Roman named Scipio, the first of the Cornelian clan whose name appears in history, had some time since arrived at Marseilles to inquire as to the chance of establishing a new trade: hoping to do an injury to the wealth of Carthage. Pytheas is the authority for the story, and for the statement that no one in the city could tell the Roman anything worth mentioning about the north and also that nothing could be learned from the merchants of Narbonne, or of " the City of Corbelo," which in the age of Pytheas was said to be a flourishing place, though the later Romans were ignorant even of its situation. The foreigner was told what perhaps he knew already, of the danger of all attempts to interfere with the Carthaginian commerce," how a ship-master of Gaddir, on his way to the tin islands, was tracked by a Roman merchant-man, but ran his ship upon a shoal, and led his enemies into the same destruction. The captain was saved on the floating wreck, and was rewarded by the Senate of Carthage with the price of the sacrificed cargo." The project of a voyage of discovery became popular at Marseilles, and a committee of merchants engaged the services of Pytheas, an eminent mathematician of that city, who was already famous for his measurement of the decli 1 Corbelo is said to be Coiron on the Loire, near Nantes (Martin, Hist. France, i. 90). Polybius described its situation (Strabo, iv. 190). nation of the ecliptic, and for the calculation of the latitude of Marseilles, by the method which he had recently invented of comparing the height of a gnomon or pillar with the length of the solstitial shadow. What kind of gnomon he used is uncertain. Pytheas was also known for his proposition "that there is no star at the pole, but a vacant spot where the pole should be, marked at a point which makes a square with the three nearest stars"; and for his studies on the influence of the moon upon the tides.1 1 On the use of the gnomon by Pytheas, see Gassendi, iv. 530. He fixed the ratio at 24 7. Strabo misquoted him, as if he had made it out to be 600: 29 (see Strabo, Geo., i. 92). Modern experiments conducted at Marseilles have shown Pytheas to be correct within a trifling fraction of 40 seconds (see a pamphlet on the subject, "Étude sur Pythéas," by L. Aout. Paris: 1866). With respect to his fixing the place of the pole-star, it should be remembered that, in the age of Pytheas, the constellation of the Little Bear had not yet been placed in the Greek celestial sphere (Humb. Cosm. ii. 103. See Strabo, i. 3). Kenrick says that the discovery of the pole-star was attributed by the Greeks to Thales. The spurious writings of Eratosthenes call it bovin, or the lode-star of the Phoenicians. Kenrick puts the matter clearly in the following passage :"The most important peculiarity in their navigation, however, was, that while the Greeks and Romans long continued to direct their course at night by the Great Bear, the Phoenicians early discovered that the Cynosure, the last star in the constellation of the Little Bear, being nearly identical in position with the pole, afforded them by its unchangeableness the means of ascertaining the true north, whenever the heavens were visible. The Phoenicians were not the first cultivators of astronomy; in this the Egyptians and Babylonians preceded them; but they applied it practically to navigation, combining with it the art of calculation, so necessary in reckoning a ship's course" (Phoen. p. 235). The Greeks for a long time did not dare to imitate the Phoenicians' nocturnal voyages. The same author appositely cites Manilius, 1. 304 "Septem illam stellæ certantes lumine signant, Pytheas was chosen as the leader of a northern expedition to explore the Iberian coast, and to proceed north as far as the "Celtic countries," and as much further as might seem expedient. Another expedition was sent southwards to explore the African coast, under the direction of Euthymenes, another man of science, with whose discoveries we are not here concerned. But we may say that he reached a river where crocodiles and hippopotami were seen in great abundance, and that the records of his voyage are almost completely lost. It will be seen hereafter that Pytheas was more fortunate, a good many fragments of his diary having been preserved, not only by Eratosthenes, and other great geographers who accepted his accounts as correct, but also in the criticisms of Polybius, which have been preserved and exaggerated in Strabo's work. It is known that his account was preserved in the shape of a diary, recording the times of passage from port to port, and it is believed that this work was embodied in two books, called "The Circuit of the Earth," and "Commentaries concerning the Ocean"; and some have supposed that these represented the results of two voyages, the one to Britain, and the other from Cadiz to "the Tanais." But a comparison of the fragments shows clearly enough that only one voyage was described, its course being from Cadiz round Spain to Brittany, from Brittany to Kent and several other parts of Britain, from the Thames to the Rhine, round Jutland along the Baltic to the Vistula (which was mistaken for the Tanais); thence out of The Phoenicians were experienced observers of the tides. Pytheas and Posidonius both noticed the ebb and flow of the tide at Gaddir (Cadiz), and attempted to give explanations of the phenomenon (Strabo, iii. 173). the Baltic and up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic Circle; thence to the Shetlands and the north of Scotland, and afterwards to Brittany again; and so to the mouth of the Garonne, where he found a route leading to Marseilles. The ships first touched at Gaddir, the Tyre of the West, where the merchants lived "quietly after the manner of the Sidonians, careless and secure, and in the possession. of riches." Here they reached the limit of Greek geographical knowledge, the Pillars or Tablets of Hercules, whom the Phoenicians called Melkarth.' The voyage to 1 The Greeks altered the name to Melicertes; and it is also believed to be the original of the "Midacritus, who first brought tin from the Cassiterides" (Plin. Hist. Nat. vii. 57). Gaddir, Gadeira, or Cadiz, was founded about 1100 B.C. The description of the city by Pytheas has either been lost, or cannot be disentangled from the details presented by the later narratives of Artemidorus and Posidonius. The following is the best modern account :-" An island (Erytheia) twelve miles in length is separated from the coast of Spain by a strait only a furlong in breadth at its narrowest part, and it is again broken into two parts, which are connected by a narrow sandy isthmus, a furlong across, the recess between the island and the opposite shore forming one of the noblest roadsteads in Europe. Two smaller islands contract the entrance and break the force of the mighty waves of the Atlantic, which render the outer bay unsafe. The Phoenician name Gaddir, an enclosure,' probably was derived from the fortification carried across the sandy isthmus to protect the city, which stood, like the modern Cadiz, on the western end of the island. In Strabo's time, Gades was second only to Rome in numbers. The temple of Saturn stood on the western extremity of the island, that of Hercules on the eastern, where the strait narrows itself to a stadium, and in the Roman times was crossed by a bridge. This temple was said to be coeval with the first establishment of the Tyrian colony, and to have remained, without renovation, unimpaired. The distinction between the Tyrian and the Theban Hercules was well known to the ancients; but after Gades became the resort of merchants and travellers from all parts of the world, the temple of Hercules received offerings and memorials, belonging rather to the Grecian than the Phoenician god. It Estrymnis, or Cape St. Vincent, took no less than five days, though the distance cannot be more than 300 miles along the coast, and the prevailing winds are favourable to a western voyage. And Strabo quoted the allegation to cast discredit on Pytheas, though Artemidorus, a later traveller, declared that he had taken nearly as long a time for the journey but there was a nearly general acceptance of what Pytheas had reported of the situation of Gaddir, and of the general geography of the Spanish coast. All the travellers appear to have been unaware of the existence of the strong south-eastward current which commences at the harbour of Cadiz. Pytheas noticed its effects; but he seems to have attributed them to the general flow of the ocean, which all the poets had described as a vast and swift river encircling the habitable earth; and he was surprised on rounding the southern face of the cape to find that the current had ceased.1 In three days more they came to the mouth of the Tagus, lying between a long sharp promontory to the south and the extremities of the mountain-range which reaches the sea at Cape Rocca. We must stay to consider very briefly the notion of the ancient geographers about this district, because it is only by that means that we can ascer contained two columns of a metal mixed of gold and silver, with an inscription in unknown characters, and therefore variously interpreted as containing mystical doctrines, or a record of the expenses of erecting the temple" (Kenrick, Phoen. 124, 127). The Greeks took the Pillars of Hercules to be the mountainous masses of Gibraltar and the opposite shore. But the first Pillars of Melkarth, mentioned in Hanno's voyage, were probably votive tablets, and not pillars; and afterwards they were identified with the columns above mentioned. 1 The exact expression was aμnúteis ñeparovoda, that "the ebb came to an end" when they had reached the western point of Spain. C |