PUYS^iCAL CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 15i 



•etwjeii the north of Europe and Asia, and subsequently with 

 Jhe Oxus and Indus, so the Samians* and Phoca^anst were 

 the first among the Greeks who endeavored to penetrate from 

 the basin of the JMediterranean toward the west. 



Coleeus of Samos sailed for Egypt, where, at that time, an 

 intercourse had begun, under Psammitichus, with the Greeks, 

 which probably was only the renewal of a former connection. 

 He was driven by easterly storms to the island of Plataea, and 

 from thence Herodotus significantly adds, " not without divine 

 direction," through the straits into the ocean. The accident- 

 al and unexpected commercial gain in Iberian Tartessus con- 

 duced less than the discovery of an entrance into an unknown 

 world (whose existence was scarcely conjectured as a mythical 

 creation of fancy) toward giving to this event importance and 

 celebrity wherever the Greek language was understood on the 

 shores of the Mediterranean. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules 

 (earlier known as the Pillars of Briareus, of -^ga3on, and of 

 Cronos), at the western margin of the earth, on the road to 

 Elysium and the Hesperides, the primeval waters of the cir- 

 cling OceanusI were first seen, in which the source? of all riv- 

 ers was then sought. 



At Phasis the navigators of the Euxine again found them- 

 selves on a coast beyond which a Sun Lake w^as supposed to 

 be situated, ana south of Gadeira and Tartessus their eyes for 

 the first time ranged over a boundless waste of waters. It 

 was this circumstance which, for fifteen hundred years, gave 

 to the gate of the inner sea a peculiar character of import- 

 ance. Ever striving to pass onward, Phoenicians, Greeks, 

 Arabs, Catalans, Majorcans, Frenchmen from Dieppe and La 

 Rochelle, Genoese, Venetians, Portuguese, and Spaniards in 

 turn attempted to advance across the Atlantic Ocean, long 

 held to be a miry, shallow, dark, and misty sea, Mare tene- 

 hrosum ; until, proceeding from station to station, as it were, 

 these southern nations, after gaining the Canaries and the 



* Herod., iv., 152. 



t Herod., i., 163, where even the discovery of Tartessus is ascribe^ 

 to the PhociKans ; but the coramercial enterprise of the Phocaians waa 

 seventy years after the time of Colaeus of Samos, according to Ukert 

 Geogr. der GriecJien rind Rorrcer, tli. 1, i., s. 40). 



X According to a fragment of Fhavorinus, uKiavog (and therefore 

 'jyriv also) are not Greek words, but merely borrowed from the barba 

 rians (Spohn, De Nlcephor. Blemm. duobus Opuscidis, 1818, p. 23). My 

 brotlier was of opinion that they were connected with the Sanscrit root* 

 9gka and ogh. (See mv Exameii Critique de V Hist, de la G4ogr., t i 

 ^ 3? and 182.) ' 



