Of course, Solomon's government, household, and buildings, as we have considered them, involved the accumulation and expenditure of vast sums of money. But the king's ambition, energy, industry, and business talent rose to the height of these demands. From two sources he drew his vast wealth, namely, taxation and commerce. He received large revenues in the way of tributes from subject peoples, in addition to the increasingly heavy taxes which he imposed on the people of Israel. Besides taxation, the king increased his wealth by means of his great commercial operations in the desert, which was the highway between the Orient and the Occident, and by means of his two fleets, one on the Mediterranean and the other on the eastern arm of the Red Sea, which provided a waterway to both Southern Asia and Western Africa. So rich did Solomon become from these sources that it is said that he "made silver and gold at Jerusalem as plentiful as stones." (2 Chron. i. 15.) There was, however, one fatal fault in Solomon's commercial policy: all the gain went to the palace and the government. Herein lay one of the secrets of the division and fall of the nation immediately upon the close of his career. Naturally, Solomon's commercial greatness, together with the pomp and splendor of his court and government, carried his fame to all parts of the earth. But that for which he received the greatest respect from surrounding nations was his wisdom, manifested in many ways but chiefly in his writings. One of the marked effects of David's long and vigorous reign was to stimulate mental activity in the Hebrew mind. The great foreign wars with the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Sabeans, and the surrounding nations, who were more or less advanced in a knowledge of the arts and sciences, had the effect of widening the range of knowledge of Israel as a nation, and of stirring her up to an ambition to excel her neighbors in affairs of peace as well as in those of war. Solomon's peaceful and wise reign, characterized as it was by commercial prosperity, gave the people both the time and means for cultivating the arts. In study and in wisdom the king was the leader of his day and generation. He was learned in political economy, a great king. He was learned in music and poetry, having composed some of the most beautiful of the Psalms, such as the second. But in cultivating the fine arts he did not neglect the physical sciences, for he was a botanist, writing of all kinds of trees and plants; and he was a natural historian, writing works on beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. It would be most interesting to see these science primers prepared by Solomon, and compare them with what we see on the same subjects in our own day. But the Bible has not preserved them, and they have long centuries ago passed into oblivion. Solomon's knowledge was not of that shallow sort which is limited to the sphere of earthly material, "seen things;" for