a high stage of social culture. Thus, for the commerce to be able to make use of the great waterways, manufactures, or at any rate agriculture, must have already existed; again, neighbouring peoples would not have been attracted to these great centres before towns and markets had grown up and prospered. Thus the great natural advantages of China, India, and Assyria, imply not only a considerable mental power on the part of the nations that profited by them, but even a civilization going back beyond the day when these advantages began to be exploited. We will now leave these specially favoured regions, and consider others. When the Phœnicians, in the course of their migration, left Tylos, or some other island in the south-east, and settled in a portion of Syria, what did they find in their new home? A desert and rocky coast, forming a narrow strip of land between the sea and a range of cliffs that seemed to be cursed with everlasting barrenness. There was no room for expansion in such a place, for the girdle of mountains was unbroken on all sides. And yet this wretched country, which should have been a prison, became, thanks to the industry of its inhabitants, a crown studded with temples and palaces. The Phœnicians, who seemed for ever condemned to be a set of fish-eating barbarians, or at most a miserable crew of pirates, were, as a fact, pirates on a grand scale; they were also clever and enterprising merchants, bold and lucky speculators. “Yes,” it may be objected, “necessity is the mother of invention; if the founders of Tyre and Sidon had settled in the plains of Damascus, they would have been content to live by agriculture, and would probably have never become a famous nation. Misery sharpened their wits, and awakened their genius.”