which they reserved to themselves, as a refuge to which they could withdraw, should fate ever compel them to desert their African homes. It is far from improbable that we may identify this obscure island with one of the Azores, which lie 800 miles from the coast of Portugal. Neither Greek nor Roman writers make other reference to them; but the discovery of numerous Carthaginian coins at Corvo, the extreme north-westerly island of the group, leaves little room to doubt that they were visited by Punic voyagers. There is therefore nothing extravagant in the assumption that we have here the “Antilla” mentioned by Aristotle. While the Carthaginian oligarchy ruled, naval adventure was still encouraged; but the maritime era of the Mediterranean belongs to more ancient centuries. The Greeks were inferior in enterprise to the Phœnicians; while the Romans were essentially unmaritime; and the revival of the old adventurous spirit with the rise of the Venetian and Genoese republics was due to the infusion of fresh blood from the great northern home of the sea-kings of the Baltic. The history of the ancient world is, for us, to a large extent, the history of civilisation among the nations around the Mediterranean Sea. Its name perpetuates the recognition of it from remote times as the great inland sea which kept apart and yet united, in intercourse and exchange of experience and culture, the diverse branches of the human family settled on its shores. Of the history of those nations, we only know some later chapters. Disclosures of recent years have startled us with recovered glimpses of the Khita, or Hittites, as a great power centred between the Euphrates and the Orontes, but extending into Asia Minor, and about B.C. 1200 reaching westward to the Ægean Sea. All but their name seemed to have perished; and they were known only as one among diverse Canaanitish tribes, believed to have been displaced by the Hebrew inheritors of Palestine. Yet now, as Professor Curtius has pointed out, we begin to recognise that “one of the paths by which the art and civilisation of Babylonia and Assyria made their way to Greece, was along the great high-road which runs across Asia Minor”; and which the projected railway route through the valley of the Euphrates seeks to revive. For, as compared with Egypt, and the earliest nations of Eastern Asia, the Greeks were, indeed, children. It was to the Phœnicians that the ancients assigned the origin of navigation. Their skill as seamen was the subject of admiration even by the later Greeks, who owned themselves to be their pupils in seamanship, and called the pole-star, the Phœnician star. Their naval commerce is set forth in glowing rhetoric by the prophet Ezekiel. “O Tyrus, thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, a merchant of the people of many isles. Thy borders are in the midst of the seas. The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners. Thy wise men, O Tyrus, were thy pilots. All the ships of