I now come to the last point which I shall notice: it is the one which first suggested to me the thought; and in it are involved debated questions of history and undescribed and unnoted geographical features. When Don Henry established himself upon the western limit of the world, to plan adventures over the then unexplored waste of waters, it was the shade of Necho that beckoned him down the African coast; led him on from cape to cape, and invited him from cluster to cluster of its islands. At length Africa was turned; there was the Indian as well as the Pacific ocean opened, and that wonderful discovery and dominion--the colonization and commerce of the Portuguese established, which dotted with their settlements the line of coast from the Pillars of Hercules to China. In Herodotus he found the voyage round the cape ordered by the Egyptian king, and the return likewise ordered _by the Pillars_ of Hercules: these orders were obeyed. The father of history, it is told, was treated as a dreamer by his Roman and Alexandrian successors; but the recent extension of knowledge has in every point confirmed his statements, and shown that, five centuries B.C., more was known of geography than in the golden age of Augustus.[190] Whether it be in fixing the points of the Lybian deserts, or in tracing the outlines of the Caspian Sea,[191] it is the old Greek who appears the accurate modern; and the geographer of the time of the Cæsars, who is the reporter of fables and of tales.[192] Thus do we find in antiquity, a counterpart to our modern disputes, and Pliny, Mela, and Strabo, are the prototypes of Rennell, Gosselin, and Mannert. The events which throw light on the circumnavigation of Africa are. 1. The expedition of Necho, as hearsay. 2. The Periplus of Hanno, in a fragment copied, by an unknown hand, from a Carthaginian monument. The voyage does not so appear to have extended beyond the western coast; but Pliny, who had other data, carries it round to the Erythræan sea. 3. The traffic of the Carthaginians on the Gold coast. The expedition of Necho[193] is flatly contradicted by Strabo, after an examination of all the evidence. The same opinion was pronounced by the school of Alexandria, Pomponius Mela, and Pliny, who contending for at least the possibility of the voyage, do not so much as mention the narrative of Herodotus, considering it doubtless a fable, because of the asserted change of shadow, which to us is evidence of its reality.