had the sun on their right, which would be natural, though Herodotus regarded this as evidence of the incredibility of the narrative. There is no inherent impossibility in such an expedition, but it led to no direct results; no further effort was made to round the continent for twenty centuries. The Phœnicians founded Carthage about 850 B.C. (though an earlier trading post occupied the site), and the Carthaginians carried out trading enterprises on their own account from their central point of vantage on the North African coast. Some time after Necho’s expedition (probably about 500 B.C.) they sent out two distant expeditions. One of these, under Hanno, appears to have consisted of a very large fleet, and to have been intended to establish trading posts along the west coast of Africa, which was already known to the Carthaginians. Certain details are furnished which serve to identify points at which he touched, and it is generally agreed that he got as far south as the neighbourhood of the Bight of Benin. Almost simultaneously Himilco made a voyage north along the west coast of Europe. He appears to have visited Britain, and mentions the foggy and limitless sea to the west. Information obtained by such means as this cannot have become in any sense the common property of the period. But there would be no mean supply of geographical data at the disposal of traders on the one hand, and at least of a few philosophers and generally well-informed persons on the other, at a period long anterior to that at which it is possible to begin our detailed history. Whatever tendency there may have been on the part of the Phœnicians, and no doubt their predecessors, to preserve their commercial secrets, there is no necessity to suppose that traders in distant lands did not describe these lands to those with whom they immediately dealt. The links in the commercial chain would then become links in a chain of geographical knowledge. This supposition granted, geographers may be prepared to risk the charge of temerity if they recognize and enjoy, as an exquisite description of the unbroken summer daylight on some northern fjord-coast, the picture of the Læstrygons’ land in _Odyssey_, X.: “Where herdsman hails herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth answers the call. There might a sleepless man have earned a double wage, the one as neatherd, the other shepherding white flocks: so near are the outgoings of the night and of the day.” And again, “the fair haven, whereabout on both sides goes one steep cliff unbroken, and jutting headlands over against each other stretch forth at the mouth of the harbour, and strait is the entrance ... no wave ever swelled within it, great or small, but there was a bright calm all around.”[1] Here are words which on their face indicate hearsay in the Mediterranean concerning Scandinavia in the Homeric age. Again, the gloomy home of the Cimmerians, at the uttermost limit of the earth, suggests hearsay