centuries elapsed before any one else repeated that feat, so far as I know;, and no wonder it was forgotten. This same Necho II did even more for maritime commerce, for he attempted to complete the canal, begun long before his time, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and seems to have made a passage along which barges and small boats might be towed, which remained open for many centuries, and in part followed the line now covered by the Suez Canal. Earlier than that Darius, the Persian conqueror of Egypt, had dug a navigable canal from the Nile to the Red Sea; and this shows that there must have been large traffic in both seas at that time to justify such tasks. [Illustration: AN EARLY ROMAN BIREME.] By this time the power and prosperity of Tyre and Sidon had declined, and Carthage, originally a colonial city, had become the most important center of Phenician influence; and from this port there sailed a century later (perhaps about 500 B. C.) an exploring expedition under a Carthaginian king named Hanno, intended to study and establish trade with the West African coast. It was a large and powerful fleet, said to number sixty galleys; and that women were taken as well as men shows that it was intended to form settlements at suitable points, as, indeed, was done. The account of it has been preserved in a short writing called the “Periplus,” by an ancient but unknown Greek; and this inscription is regarded by most scholars as entirely authentic, since all its details conform to modern knowledge, even though it is impossible to identify surely the various points mentioned. It tells us that the terminus of Hanno’s exploration was an island beyond a gulf called Noti Cornu, in which he found a company of hairy women, whom the interpreters called _gorillas_. It was in memory of this that the manlike apes which a few years ago were discovered on the west coast of Africa received the same name; but they are not known anywhere north of the Kamerun Mountains, while the farthest point any critic is willing to believe reached by Hanno is the Bight of Benin, some distance north of the Kameruns. It is easy to believe that the inquiring Carthaginians might have heard of these apes,—or perhaps of chimpanzees, now found as far north as the Gambia River,—and reported actually seeing them, in order to add glory to their name. At any rate, this expedition increased largely the ancient knowledge of the sea in that direction; and navigators now knew the shores of the Atlantic from the Gulf of Guinea to the North Sea; but there the knowledge of the world seems to have rested for more than a dozen centuries, principally, no doubt, because there seemed nothing beyond, either north or south, to invite the merchants who then, as ever since, have been the principal promoters of discovery. It is only within the past century that voyages of discovery have been undertaken purely for the sake of the increase of knowledge.