122 DANIEL WILSON ON 
he adds: “We may venture to affirm, in general terms, that a South American verb is 
constructed precisely as those in the Tamul and other languages of Southern India; con- 
sisting, like them, of a verbal root, a second element defining the time of the action, and 
a third denoting the subject or person.” 3 
So far it becomes apparent that the evidence, derived alike from language and from 
other sources, points to the isolation of the American continent through unnumbered 
ages. The legend of the lost Atlantis is true in this, if in nothing else, that it relegates 
the knowledge of the world beyond the Atlantic, by the early maritime races of the Medi- 
terranean, to a time of hoar antiquity in the age of Socrates, or even of Solon. But at a 
greatly later date the Caribbean Sea was scarcely more a mystery to the dwellers on the 
shores of the Ægean, than was the Baltic or the North Sea. Herodotus, indeed, expressly 
affirms his disbelief in “a river, called by the barbarians, Eridanus, which flows into a 
northern sea, and from which there is a report that amber is wont to come.” Never- 
theless, we learn from him of Greek traders exchanging personal ornaments and woven 
stuffs for the furs and amber of the North. They ascended the Dneiper as far as Gerrhos, 
a trading post, forty days’ journey inland; and the tokens of their presence there have 
been recovered in modern times. Not only hoards of Greek coins, minted in the fifth 
century B.C., but older golden gryphons of Assyrian workmanship have been recovered 
during the present century, near Bromberg in Posen, and at Kiev on the Dneiper. As 
also, far out in the Atlantic, on the most northern island of the Azores, hoards of Cartha- 
ginian coins have revealed the traces of the old Punic voyager there ; similar evidence 
may yet be recovered in Central America, if more ancient voyagers from Sidon, Tyre, or 
Seleucia, did find their way in some old forgotten century to lands that lay beyond the 
waste of waters, which seemed to engirdle their world. 
But also the carving of names and dates, and other graphic memorials of the passing 
wayfarer, is no mere modern custom. When the sites of the Greenland settlements of the 
Northmen of the tenth century were discovered in our own day, the runic inscriptions left 
no room for doubt as to their former presence there. By like evidence we learn of them 
in southern lands, from their runes still legible on the marble lion of the Piræus, since 
transported to its later site in the arsenal of Venice. At Maes How in Orkney, in St. 
Molio’s Cave on the Clyde, at Kirk Michael in the Isle of Man; and on many a rock and 
stone by the Baltic, the sea-rovers from the north have left enduring evidence of their 
wanderings. So was it with the Roman. From the Moray Frith to the Libyan desert, 
and from the Iberian shore to the Syrian valleys, sepulchral, legionary, and mythological 
inscriptions, as well as coins, medals, pottery and works of art, mark the footprints of 
the masters of the world. In Italy itself Perusinian, Eugubine, Etruscan, and Greek 
inscriptions tell the story of a succession of races in that beautiful peninsula. It was 
the same, through all the centuries of Hellenic intellectual rule, back to the unrivalled 
inscription at Abbu Simbel. This was cut, says Dr. Isaac Taylor,’ “ when what we 
call Greek history can hardly be said to have commenced: two hundred years before 
Herodotus, the Father of History, had composed his work; a century before Athens began 
to rise to power. More ancient even than the epoch assigned to Solon, Thales, and the 
seven wise men of Greece: it must be placed in the half-legendary period at which the laws 

1 The Alphabet, ii. 10. 
