The polarity of the needle, the art of manufacturing gems, which did not die with them,--were of the secrets not hidden from Tyre. Her story, by their aid, ceases to be a vision, and becomes a state;--her greatness descends from its cloud, and walks the earth. FOOTNOTES: [126] “Numberless passages of Greek and Latin authors prove that _the ancients_, when they lost sight of land, had no other guide than the stars.”--PUGENS, _Trésor des Origines_, p. 190. [127] “Had the Saracens known the compass, it was for them to have discovered America.”--VOLTAIRE, _Ep. sur les Mœurs_, c. cxlix. [128] The Phœnician name for the compass was interpreted by the Greeks “unknown gods.” [129] This was written before the appearance of Mr. Smith’s interesting work on the “Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul.” He has vindicated ancient seamanship as to dimensions of vessels, length of voyage, working, &c. One deficiency in that work has been supplied by Humboldt in “Cosmos,” in reference to calculation of distances, or the “Log.” [130] The original names of Greece and the Islands, of Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Spain, France, Italy, and England, are indelible monuments of the presence and wisdom of the Phœnicians. Plato refers reverentially to the men who gave the first names. Bochart, in the preface to “Pheleg,” enumerates about 400 names; for instance, Parnassus, Ithaca, Malaga, Samos, Marathon, which are without meaning in Greek. It is descriptive in Hebrew and Arabic,--that is, in Phœnician. [131] Τὸ πόρσω Δ’ ἔσι σοφοῖς ἄβατον κᾀσόφοις, οὺ μὴν διὠξω κενὸς εἴην. PIND. _Olymp._ 3. He is speaking of the region beyond the Pillars. [132] In the twelfth century, B.C., Thschen-li records a measurement of the solstitial shadow, which La Place found accordant with the theory of the alteration of the obliquity of the Ecliptic. _Cosmos_. The Babylonian astronomical observations sent by Callisthenes to Greece, have been calculated by Simplicius to extend back 1903 years before Alexander the Great. Mr. Colebrooke has settled the date of one of the Vedas to be the fourteenth century B.C., by the place given to the solstitial points in a calendar appended to it. “That the planets and their courses, the comets and theirs, that gravitation and repulsion were perfectly familiar to the priests of Memphis, though unknown to, or rather repudiated by, the most learned and philosophical of the Greeks, cannot to-day be questioned. They know the milky way to be composed of fixed stars, and the sun to be a fixed star.”--DRUMMOND’S _Origines_, b. iv. c. 6; b. vii. c. 8. “Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the French astronomers found with surprise that there existed in Siam a mode of calculating eclipses by successive operations worked with numbers apparently arbitrary. The key of this method has been long lost.”--_Occult Sciences_, vol. i. p. 191.