Before the arrival of the Chinese junk, had any one said that he had deciphered from the Eugubean tables that the discovery of America had been made by a large vessel, which had neither stem nor stern, kelson nor transom-beam, neither iron for its anchors, hemp for its cables, canvass for its sails, pitch, oakum, standing-rigging, rudder pintles, or pumps;--that with a taffrail standing forty feet above the water, it was not caulked,--whoever believed the story would have been set down as foolishly credulous and stupidly ignorant. Men, after the original conception, are but blind practisers of what they have been taught, and see only what they already know: with all our travellers and sailors in China and in India, no one in Europe could have imagined, that the Chinese had an original scheme of naval architecture the very converse of ours, attaining the end in no instance by the means which we employ, and standing in relation to ours as a cetcaeous animal to one of the mammiferæ--as a turtle to a man. The Chinese might have seen Phœnician vessels for 3,000 years before ours came round the Cape. They have imitated them as little as they have since copied ours. Vasco di Gama found the compass in these seas, not in junks but in vessels constructed like ours: ours are the continuation of those of the Phœnicians.[158] They left, doubtless, a progeny in the Indian Ocean as well as the Mediterranean. As in naval architecture neither of the styles could have been copied, and each must have been original,--so is it with their compasses; neither could have been copied from the other, and the invention must have been in each case separately made. A secret such as this could be preserved and transmitted only by constant use. How then could it have come from Phœnicia to us? Augury had been swept away from the face of the earth. A thousand years had run their course between the fall of Tyre and the maritime enterprises of the Saracens. Thirty generations had gone to the tomb. The difficulty I fully admit and feel. I oppose to it the intrinsic evidence offered by the instrument, and the impossibility of referring it to any other race, Chinese, Mussulman, Arabs, Hindoos, or to the systems of modern Europe. That it must have passed, I contend; how it passed is another matter. The knowledge of the road is no point of my argument:--nevertheless, I think I have found the clue.