Some of the later developments of the marine instinct in the Mediterranean and adjacent seas became grotesque. Personal pride and a keen sense of rivalry caused the King of Sicily and his brother sovereigns of Macedonia, Asia, and Alexandria during the fourth and third centuries B.C. to construct men-of-war on a huge scale. A temple in Cyprus commemorates the builder of a twenty- and a thirty-fold vessel. But there was even a forty-fold vessel constructed by Ptolemy Philopator about the year 220 B.C., which was the size of one of our big liners of to-day. Two hundred and eighty cubits she measured in length, thirty-eight she was wide. Her stem rose 48 cubits above the water with only a 4-cubit draught, while the stern-ornament was 53 cubits high in the air. Fitted with a double prow which had seven rams, a double stern with four steering paddles 30 cubits each in length, the largest of her oars measured 38 cubits in length, but they were nicely balanced by weighting them with an equipoise of lead near the handles. Twelve strong cables 600 cubits long girded her together, and her complement was far greater than any vessel of modern times, four thousand oarsmen, 400 sailors, 2850 soldiers, to say nothing of the retinue of servants and the stores which she carried besides. There was also an enormous Nile barge 280 cubits long, built by Sesostris, but such craft as the fore-mentioned must be looked upon less as an opportunity for practising the seaman’s art than as a vulgar display of wealth. The true war-vessel was made in the proportions of length seven or eight times her width, and drew about 3 feet of water. Light, shallow, and flat, not particularly seaworthy, they were utterly different from the round, heavy, strong, decked merchantman. The war-galley’s triple-spiked ram had come into use as far back as 556 B.C. The galley was most certainly fast and built of fir with a keel of oak. Competent modern authorities agree in estimating the speed of the galley and merchantman in those days as about 7½ to 4 (or 5) knots respectively. [Illustration: PORTIONS OF EARLY MEDITERRANEAN ANCHOR IN LEAD FOUND OFF THE COAST OF CYRENE. (In the British Museum.)]