from the North Cape to join the continent of Scythia. Nor do we find that he observed any signs of human habitation. The king of Thule and his romantic people, and the felicities of the arctic summer, are the products of later fancy. His attention seems to have been mainly directed to the phenomenon of the midnight sun. "In some places," he said, "the night was three hours long; in others it was two hours long; at last the sun used to rise almost as soon as he had set." Again, "the sun revolved from west to east and shone through the whole of the summer night"; the sun did not rise nor set, but only crossed along the horizon. "Where the whole tropic of Cancer was above the horizon the day was a month long; and where only part of the tropic circle appeared, the day was long in proportion." "At the pole itself the day and night are each six months long." And the list of fragments might easily be lengthened, for every astronomer who lived after him endeavoured to record or explain something of the phenomena reported by Pytheas.1

Two of his phrases, by their obscure and archaic diction, have given rise to repeated controversies. The first is the celebrated saying that "in Thule the summer tropic is the same as the arctic circle," the latter term being used in its old Greek sense to denote the heavenly circle containing all the stars which never dip below the horizon; and in this sense of the term every latitude had its own arctic circle. The meaning of Pytheas was that at some point in the north the sun never set during the summer. The uncouthness of the expression was probably caused by a

1 See the passages from Cleomedes, Hipparchus, Pliny, and others, which are collected in the first Appendix.

notion that the tropic of Cancer was a physical line or groove which might be seen above the horizon.1

The second obscurity is contained in the passage preserved by Geminus. "The barbarians used to point out to us the lair or sleeping-place of the sun; for the nights at one place were only three hours long, at another place only two hours," &c. Several writers have raised unnecessary difficulties by taking the passage to mean, that the barbarians showed Pytheas where the sun set at different times in the year, or that, though the weather was dark, they showed him the true point of sunset, and so on. What the savages meant was plain enough. They had watched the sun's places of rising and setting as they went north, and at last had discovered the spot on the horizon immediately above the cave or home where the divine spirit or animal lived. There could have been nothing very strange in this to Pytheas, who had himself contested a fashionable theory, that the earth was a kind of enormous whale, whose breathings and spoutings caused the flux and reflux of the tide.

Another passage about a substance resembling the "sea-nettles" or medusa, which in Greek were called "sea-lungs," has become celebrated for its difficulty of interpretation.

1 See Strabo, i. 92, and the passages collected in the first Appendix. Gassendi explains the matter in his tract "Proportio Gnomonis," &c., Op. iv. 530.

2 Compare Homer's "homes and dancing-places of the Dawn": ὅθι τ' Ηοῦς ήριγενείης

Οἴκια καὶ χόροι εἴσι καὶ ἀντολαί Ηελίοιο.Od. xii. 4. "Allen Gestirnen werden bestimmte Stätten, Plätze und Stühle beigelegt, auf denen sie Sitz und Wohnung nehmen: sie haben ihr Gestell und Gerüste. Zumal gilt das von der Sonne die jeden Tag zu ihrem Sitz, oder Sessel niedergeht" (Grimm, Deut. Myth. 663).

"After one day's journey," he said, "to the north of Thule men come to a sluggish sea, where there is no separation of sea, land, and air, but a mixture of all these elements like the substance of jelly-fish, through which one can neither walk nor sail. I have seen the stuff like jelly-fish, but all the rest I have taken on hearsay.”1

We cannot feel certain as to the nature of this floating and blubber-like mass. The simplest explanation, and perhaps the best, attributes the reference to the rotten and spongy ice which sometimes fills those northern waters. Others take the matter literally, and refer it to the medusa, which are abundant in some parts of Norway, and which must have been familiar to Pytheas before he commenced his journey. Gassendi, who took Thule for Iceland, explained the matter as referring to the dense fumes from Hekla. Others take it for a description of cold and clinging fogs; others, with Malte Brun, as a picture of the quicksands near the northern shores of Jutland.3

Many stories were afterwards told about the sluggish waters described by Pytheas, and when the locality of Thule was shifted to Shetland by the Roman writers, it was duly noticed that "the waters are slow, and yield with difficulty to the oar, and they are not even raised by the wind like other seas."

1 Strabo, ii. 142.

2 For the abundance of these creatures in Norway and the salt-water lake of Mortaigne, near Narbonne, comp. Pontopp. Nat. Hist. ii. 182, and Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, ii. 129, there cited. It is, perhaps, worth noticing that the Frozen Sea is or was called by the Norwegians "Leber Zee," or 66 sea of a substance like liver." Pontanus, Descr. Dan. 747; Arvedson's Pytheas, 26.

3 The different opinions are very well collected and compared in Arvedson's note, reprinted in the first Appendix.

4 Tac. Agric. c. 10. "This agrees with the sea on the N.E. of Scotland,

From the description of the Mare Pigrum, which has been already cited from the "Germania," and the mention in that place of the divine forms, and the head crowned with rays, and strange sounds heard by night, we may infer that the ancient travellers saw the Aurora Borealis. The ray-crowned head may represent the dark segment of sky enclosed in the electric arch and the meteoric rays, which have given the name of the " "Merry Dancers" to the flickering Northern Lights.1

Pytheas did not, so far as appears, explore any part of the mainland of Thule, nor do we know the point at which he turned his ship for the southward voyage. We must suppose that he never reached the "ruddy-tinged granite” of the cape that looks upon the Polar Sea. the Polar Sea. All that he actually said was, that beyond the dead sea "Morimorusa was a sea called "Cronium," covered with a solid crust; and, knowing nothing of the nature of the frozen ocean or of its "palæocrystic" ice, he conjectured that the amber of the Baltic coast might perhaps be broken morsels from the crust of the unknown sea!

Turning from Thule they sailed south for six days and nights before they reached the shores of Britain. They not for the reason given by Tacitus, but because of the contrary tides, which drive several ways and stop not only boats with oars, but ships under sail" (Wallace, Essay concerning Thule. 31). "The tides in Orkney run with such an impetuous current, that a ship is no more able to make way against them than if it were hindered by a remora." (Wallace, Orkney. 4. 7.)

1 The Aurora is called "the Morrice Dancers" in Shetland. The early writers on northern phenomena published some amusing speculations on the origin of the Aurora. Some took it for the reflection of distant volcanoes, or the refracted image of the sun; and "the celebrated Wolfius described it as immature lightning, or an imperfect tempest." (Pontopp. Nat. Hist. i. 7.)

probably touched at the Orkneys, of which the three largest were then, or soon afterwards, known as Dumna, Ocetis, and Pomona: the last name has remained till modern times, and from its classical form has been the origin of curious myths as to the fruitfulness of the northern zone. Among the islands to the north of Britain the travellers noticed an extraordinary rush of the tides in tortuous and funnel-shaped channels between the cliffs: if Pliny's quotation' is correct, the water rose 80 cubits or 120 feet. This height of the tide is not greater than has been measured in the Bay of Fundy, and it is probably approached in the narrow inlets of the Faroe Isles; but the circumstance is so rare in any part of the world that we must suppose some mistake to have been made in the calculation or in the course of making the extract. We know hardly anything of the remainder of the voyage. The criticisms already quoted from Strabo show that Pytheas did not visit Ireland, or the western coast of Britain. He must have skirted the eastern shore as far as Kent and the neighbourhood of Gaul, landing (as he said) when he could, and traversing the accessible parts of the island. The expedition returned by the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, as far as the mouth of the Gironde. Pytheas was unwilling to repeat the tedious journey round Spain; and he accordingly ascended the Garonne, and from the neighbourhood of the modern Bourdeaux succeeded in reaching his native city by a journey over-land.

Here ended the voyage of Pytheas. Apart from later criticisms and controversies we know nothing more of his life or works, except that an early scholiast preserved an

1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. ii. 97.