As to the vexed question of the land of Ophir, I do not feel that it is necessary to go into the arguments for and against here. Mashonaland may have been the land of Ophir or it may not; it may have been the land of Punt or it may not; Ophir and Punt may be identical, and both situated here, or they may be both elsewhere. There is not enough evidence, as far as I can see, to build up any theory on these points which will satisfy the more critical investigation to which subjects of this kind are submitted in the present day. All that we can satisfactorily establish is that from this country the ancient Arabians got a great deal of gold; but as gold was in common use in prehistoric times, and lavishly used many centuries before our era, there is no doubt that the supply must have been enormous, and must have been obtained from more places than one. ‘Tyre heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets,’ Zechariah tells us (ix. 3), and the subject could be flooded with evidence from sculptural and classical sources; and though the output from the old workings in Mashonaland is seen to have been immense, yet it can hardly have supplied the demand that antiquity made upon it. The study of Arabian and Phœnician enterprise outside the Red Sea is only now in its infancy—we have only as yet enough evidence to prove its extent, and that the ruins in Mashonaland owe their origin to it. After the commencement of the Christian era there is a great gap in our geographical knowledge of these parts; and as far as Western civilisation is concerned, this corner of the world had to be discovered anew. It was not so, however, with the Arabians, who, though probably banished from the interior many centuries before by the incursions of savage tribes, still held to the coast, and exchanged with the natives their cloth and their beads for gold which they brought down. Of Arab extension in Africa we have also other evidence. The ‘Periplus’ tells us that the Sabæan King Kharabit in A.D. 35 was in possession of the east coast of Africa to an indefinite extent. The Greek inscription from Axume in Abyssinia, copied by Mr. Salt in his travels there, further confirms this. It was a dedication to Mars of one golden statue, one silver, and three of brass in honour of a victory gained by ‘Aizanes, king of the Axomites, of the Homerites (given us by Eratosthenes as one of the Arabian tribes), of the Æthiopians, and of the Sabæans.’ Three cities of the name of Sabæ are mentioned as connected with this kingdom, two in Arabia and one in Æthiopia; and now we have the river which doubtless in those days formed the great outlet for the population between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, still bearing the name of Sabæ or Sabi, and in the Æthiopian tongue the word Saba is still used for ‘a man.’ Herr Eduard Glaser, the Arabian traveller and decipherer of Himyaritic inscriptions, states in his work: ‘So much is absolutely certain, that Himyar (Arabia) then