I am fortunate in being able to supplement our previous knowledge of ships of this period by some important information that has been brought to light through excavations and discoveries near Tunis in Northern Africa. These were completed by M. P. Gauckler only as recently as the year 1904, and I am indebted to his very interesting account[21] for much of the information to be derived from these. In a building at Althiburus, near to Tunis, a mosaic was unearthed containing about thirty representations of several kinds of sailing and rowing boats. Below nearly every one the artist has thoughtfully put the name of each craft, usually in both Greek and Latin. Not one of these is a war-vessel. This is exceedingly fortunate, since hitherto we have possessed far less information of the trading vessels than of the biremes, triremes and Liburnian galleys. But the ships in the Althiburus mosaic all belong entirely to the mercantile marine. The discovery, in fact, has brought to light the most complete and precise catalogue we possess of ancient ships of Rome. M. Gauckler thinks that this list has been taken from some glossary or nautical handbook written about the middle of the first century before our era. He fixes the date of the mosaics as about 200 A.D., and the evidence of the ships themselves certainly confirms the view that they belong to some period not much before the time of the birth of our Lord. The mosaic includes a number of craft that were not sailing ships, such as the _schedia_ or raft, the _tesseraria_, a rowing boat called the _paro_, the _musculus_ or _mydion_, and the _hippago_, a pontoon for transporting horses across a waterway. But whether sailing or rowing boats, they all bear unmistakable traces of the influence of the Phœnician, Greek and Roman war-galleys. Almost every craft shows an effort, not altogether successful, to break away from the design that had dominated the Mediterranean so long, for we must not forget that it is an historical fact that the Romans, though they brought the war-galley as near perfection as possible, did this at the expense of the merchant ships, which they sadly neglected. It is only natural, of course, that a nation that is always at war has no time to expand its merchant shipping. The reverse was the case with the Egyptians, who, being more of a peace-loving nature, developed their cargo ships far more, for it was not until fairly late in Egyptian history that the warship was attended to; we may even go so far as to assert that it was not until the time of the Middle Ages that the merchant ship both of the Mediterranean and the North of Europe, made any real progress. As long as civilisation was scanty and pirates were rampant on every sea, commerce was bound to remain at a standstill. Indeed, in the time of the early Greeks, it was thought no act of discourtesy to ask a seafaring stranger whether he was a pirate or merchant. So accustomed are we in these days to peace