THE FISHMEN 



earlier records of sea explorations of all kinds are lost. 

 We surmise that man's knowledge of the sea was limited 

 to depths of about two hundred fathoms until recent 

 times, but we know practically nothing of man's adven- 

 tures or inventions in the long centuries before the 

 Christian era. 



The destruction of the Alexandrian libraries (begun by 

 a mob of fanatical pseudo-Christians in a.d. 391, and 

 completed at the taking of Alexandria by the Arabs 

 two hundred and fifty years later) deprived mankind of 

 an enormous amount of recorded knowledge of earlier 

 sea exploration : with it, no doubt, numerous accounts of 

 attempts to penetrate the sea's surface, by the use of 

 sounding devices, and underwater appliances of all kinds. 

 Four hundred and ninety thousand volumes or rolls 

 (some authorities estimate that the collection contained 

 nearly 700,000, with some duplicates) were lost for- 

 ever. 



There are many museums and other institutions which 

 contain specimens of old-time sounding, dredging and 

 diving devices, notably a fine one at Monaco, but ex- 

 planations of their use in the form of accounts or records 

 are rare and unreliable before the burning of the Alex- 

 andrian library. Herodotus mentions ocean soundings, 

 and there are such references to them as those which 

 occur in the account of St. Paul's shipwreck, in the Acts 

 of the Apostles (where they took soundings and "found 

 it twenty fathoms") but as we recede in history we 

 realize that there must have been numerous soundings, 

 divings and explorations (of which we have only isolated 

 accounts) for thousands of years after primitive man had 

 overcome his fear of the sea. 



Mother-of-pearl, which cannot be picked up in any 

 quantities on the shore, and must be sought for by diving, 

 has been found in excavated ornaments of the Sixth 

 Dynasty Thebes — about 3,200 e.g., and even in earlier 

 excavations, in smaller amounts, going back a thousand 



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