What do the critics do with it? They look at it, handle it, turn it over and over, taste it, chew it, kick it, and do everything with it but explain it; exerting all the while the extremest ingenuity to avoid the simple explanation before their eyes. Some make them to be pillars set up like those of Hercules,[184] some “votive offerings,” some “rocking stones,”[185] some “amulets.” Of course there is not a shadow of ground for any one of these interpretations, and they are each directly at variance with the description which the ancients have left us of the thing; their explanation, in every case, consisting in making out the thing to be different from that which it is described. Some indeed go further, and scoff and jeer; set Sanconiathon right, and undertake the revision of all the writers, and of all the copyists who have ever described Batylia, or transcribed the description. We learn by a line in Priscian, the name or _a_ name, by which the Phœnicians knew them. He says, “they call _Abadir_, the stone given by Rhea to Saturn;” elsewhere the word Abadir occurs, as said to be applied by the Phœnicians to “unknown gods.” Abadir is not Hebrew, and an emendation has been suggested by Bochard, _aban-dir_, which means _round stone_. These round stones[186] supply the last link in the chain. The magnet must have been consulted with ceremonies, and considered as an oracle or a god. When the vessels returned into harbour it would be carried to the Temple, and exposed, like the other mysteries, to the gaze of the vulgar and uninitiated. Here, laid up in the Temples, are the compasses of the Phœnician argosies, preserved as sacred to the latter days of Paganism, although the secret would have died out centuries before.