That in early times there should have been a Malay immigration into Madagascar is nothing strange. Every thing new which we are learning about the Indian Ocean and the China Sea tends to show how boldly and continuously those seas were traversed before the Christian era. Phœnician navigation, both from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, was ably carried out even in the time of Solomon; and the evidence is accumulating that their colonies, trading settlements, and ports of call were established along all the African and Indian coasts before the Ptolemies had ceased to rule. They had long since learned the regularity of the monsoons and decided how to employ them; Zanzibar and its neigbourhood had become the head-quarters of the Central African trade; and every year a great fleet crossed the Indian ocean from the ports of Gujerat and Malabar with the north-east monsoon. What was a twenty days’ voyage before a fair and steady breeze, to men accustomed to the sea, in large vessels of three hundred and eight hundred tons, such as the Alexandrian corn ships or the buggalows of the Gulf of Cutch, with their strong masts, long yard, and huge sails? To me it seems that they mastered the navigation early: its continuity was never broken till Albuquerque and Almeida took it with violence from their hands: and I venture to think that in the Arab merchants of these Eastern seas, with their Khojah friends in Western India and the “Old Man of the Mountain,” at their head, we have the lineal descendants, in blood and language and employment, of the Phœnicians of ancient times.