then variously called.

3. Pliny also 6: 31-36, locates the western Ethiopians somewhere in the Atlantic. This shows that Crates and Pliny believed that the great poet Homer believed in the existence of a great continent on the western shore of the Atlantic ocean.

4. Plato says in his Timaeus, Chapter VI.: “The sea” (the Atlantic ocean), “was indeed navigable and had an island fronting the mouth which you in your tongue call the Pillars of Hercules, and this island is larger than Libya and Asia put together, and there is a passage hence for travelers of that day to the rest of the islands, as well as from those islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds the real sea.

5. Humboldt quotes that Anaxagoras, who was born five hundred years B. C., and was a most eminent Greek philosopher, speaks of the grand division of the world beyond the ocean.

6. Aelian in his Variæ Historiæ, Book 3, Chapter 18, cites Theopompus, an eminent Greek historian, born about three hundred years B. C., as stating that the Meropians inhabit a large continent beyond the ocean, in comparison with which the known world was but an island.

7. Aristotle says in Chapters 84 and 85: “Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, they say that an inhabited island was discovered by the Carthagenians, which abounded in forests and navigable rivers and fruits of all kinds, distant from the continent many days’ sail. And while the Carthagenians were engaged in making voyages to this land, and some had even settled there on account of the fertility of the soil, the Senate decreed that no one thereafter, under penalty of death, should voyage thither.” Aristotle was born three hundred and eighty-four years before Christ.

8. Diodorus of Sicily, who lived in the century preceding the Christian Era, says in his Book 5,—19 and 20, that it was the “Phœnicians instead of the Carthagenians who were cast upon a most fertile island opposite Africa, where the climate was that of perpetual spring, and that the land was the proper habitation for gods rather than men.”

He speaks of the continent, however, at length and with great detail, enumerating its fertile valleys and navigable rivers, its rich and abundant fruits and supply of game, its valuable forests and its genial climate.

9. Pliny quotes Statius Sebosus, in his volume 2, page 106, Bohn, as saying that the two Hesperides are forty-two days’ sail from the coast of Africa.

THE PHŒNICIAN PEOPLE WERE EQUAL TO THE DISCOVERIES ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT, IF WE JUDGE THEM BY WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHED.

The prophet Isaiah, writing soon after seven hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy, gives us a pretty good idea of the unlimited commerce and the unlimited prosperity of the merchants of Tyre. Among other things he says the following, speaking of the City “Whose antiquity is of ancient days.” He calls the City “The Crowning City,” “whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.” The wealth and luxury of Tyre was eternally injurious to the Jewish people from the time of their return from Egypt to Canaan to the carrying away of Israel to Babylon in the later days. The Jewish husbandman, dazzled by the luxuries of Tyre and Sidon, was affected as those in more moderate circumstances are in later days, by the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and were building groves in high places under which to worship, as did the priests of Baal in Palestine, and under the oaks in the northwest of Europe, where they acquired the name of Druids. They forsook the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth and Astarte, the Phœnician Venus.

They even sacrificed their children to Moloch, the relentless fire god, as Baal appeared in his sterner characteristics. But upon the loss of wealth which Phœnicia sustained in the wars with Nebuchadnezzar and subsequently with Alexander, the Phœnicians ceased to be conspicuously wealthy and luxurious, and Israel was left to worship that God who called their father Abraham from upper Chaldea, and who afterwards brought him out of the “House of Bondage” in Egypt after having been four hundred years enslaved there.

We have now glanced at the widespread influence of the Phœnician people over the borders of the Mediterranean sea and over the west and northwest of Europe.

Let it be remembered that what we have said upon this subject is founded upon authentic evidence from ancient history and modern fact.

Let us look for a moment now and see what these peoples accomplished through the waters of the Red sea and upon the waters easterly of the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. After Solomon had associated with Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram, the son of Abif, the chief of the mechanics who built the temple, and become acquainted with the wealth brought home by Phœnician ships from the great outside world, his spirit of Jewish thrift was excited, and he determined to share in the profits of nautical adventures. In the first book of Kings, chapter 9, verses 26, 27 and 28, we find the following: “And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion Geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen who had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon.

“And they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.” In the 18th chapter of this book, 11th and 12th verses, we find the following: “And the navy also of Hiram that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees and precious stones, and the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the lord and for the king’s house, harps also and psalteries for the singers. There came no such almug trees nor were seen unto this day.”

In the Second of Chronicles, chapter 9, verses 10 and 11, we find the following: “And the servants also of Hiram and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought algum trees and precious stones, and the king made of the algum trees terraces to the house of the lord and to the king’s palace, and harps and psalteries for the singers, and there were none such seen before in the land of Judah.”

In Second Kings, chapter 10, verse 22, we find the following: “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram. Once in three years came the navy of Tharshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks.” This navy of Tharshish is beyond question the navy of big ships manned by Jews and Phœnicians, and the expression here used beyond question is used in the sense we should use in speaking of a navy of big ships, or Baltimore Clippers.

In Second Chronicles, chapter 3, verse 6, we find the following: “And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty, and the gold was gold of Parvaim.”

We will not at the present time stop to ask where was Ophir, where was Parvaim, where did the sailors of Tyre, so skilled in navigation and so capable of navigating the western ocean, as we have seen them to be, as to make successful voyages over to the Orkneys, a distance of some four thousand miles from their homes, spend the three years during which they were absent on their voyages from the easterly gulf of the Red Sea? No Jewish lexicon tells us of almug or algum trees; no Hebrew writer undertakes to describe them. But that enterprising publicist, O’Donovan, who for the purposes of knowledge a few years ago traversed the Caucasus, crossed the Caspian sea and buried