Next to the squaresail rig, none has survived so persistently as the lateen. I think that in all probability it was adapted, a few centuries before the introduction of Christianity, from the Egyptian squaresail. Its very appearance and the corner of the world in which it is found as the prevailing rig both suggest that. It is reasonable to assume that in the course of years, when the more experienced Easterns began to discover the art of sailing against the wind and to find that the rig of the Nile boats was not suitable for this, there would be evolved a modification of the Egyptian sail to allow of tacking. This, probably, was the origin of the lateen sail of the dhow. It is of extreme antiquity, and has endured with but little alteration from the time of Alexander the Great, about 350 B.C. The prevalence of this kind of rig in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, off the East Coast of Africa, especially as far south as Zanzibar, is well known. The fact that it is still found everywhere up and down the Mediterranean, on the Nile and on Swiss lakes, shows how firmly established did this lateen rig become in the course of time. As we shall see, at a subsequent stage the lateen sail was adopted by our mediæval ships for the mizzen, and this continued right down till the close of the eighteenth century. It will assist us to realise this conservatism if we remember that the ships of St. Paul’s time were of a similar kind to these Eastern ships of which we are now speaking. Let me here be allowed to quote again from an author who has sailed in every sea and been preserved to tell us in so many charming records what many others have seen but not troubled to notice. In a further essay on “The Sea in the New Testament” Mr. Bullen, referring to the ships in which St. Paul voyaged, remarks: “On the East African coast, even to this day, we find precisely the same kind of vessels, the same primitive ideas of navigation, the same absence of even the most elementary notions of comfort, the same touching faith in its being always fine weather as evinced by the absence of any precautions against a storm.