The early history of Lighthouses is very uncertain; and some ingenious antiquaries, finding the want of authentic records, have been anxious to supply the deficiency by conjectures based upon casual and obscure allusions in ancient writers, and by vague hypotheses drawn from the heathen mythology. Some writers have gone so far as to imagine, that the Cyclopes were the keepers of lighthouses; whilst others have actually maintained that Cyclops was intended, by a bold prosopopœia, to represent a lighthouse itself.[24] A notion so fanciful deserves little consideration; and accords very ill with that mythology of which it is intended to be an exposition, as seems sufficiently plain from a passage in the ninth Odyssey, where Homer (who flourished about 907 B. C.), after describing the darkness of the night, informs us that the fleet of Ulysses actually struck the shore of the Cyclopean island, before it could be seen.[25] [24] This spirit of etymological conjecture has converted _Cyclops_, _Proteus_, _Cneph_, _Phanes_, _Canobus_, _Chiron_, _Tithonus_, _Thetis_, _Amphitrite_, _Minotaurus_, _Chronus_, _Phrontis_, and other demigods, into celebrated lighthouses, or, at all events, has imagined that those mythological personages were worshipped under the emblem of fire or light in buildings, which, at the same time, served as guides to the benighted mariner. On the faith, also, of similar obscure and finely drawn etymologies, various places, such as _Calpe_ and _Abyla_, the opposite points of Africa and Europe, at the Straits of the Mediterranean, have been unhesitatingly recognized as the sites of celebrated light-towers; and the Latin words _turris_ and _columna_ have been supposed primarily to signify a lighthouse, the first being written _Tor-is_, the _Tower of fire_, and the _Col-on_, the _Pillar of the Sun_. [25] Ἔνθ’ ὄυτις τὴν νῆσον ἐσέδρακεν ὀφθαλμοῒσιν Ὅυτ’ οὖν κύματα μακρὰ κυλινδόμενα ποτὶ χέρσον Ἐισίδομεν πρὶν νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους ἐπικελσαι. _Odyss._, ix., 146. Nor does there appear any better reason for supposing, that under the history of Tithonus, Chiron, or any other personage of antiquity, the idea of a lighthouse was conveyed; for such suppositions, however reconcileable they may appear with some parts of mythology, involve obvious inconsistencies with others. It seems, indeed, most improbable, that, in those early times, when navigation was so little practised, the advantages of beacon lights were so generally known and acknowledged as to render them the objects of mythological allegory.