— 
129 
"progress, man’s treasury, the source of the increase of man’s - 
wealth. Navigation by stored food and the tTTLE POINTER 
was made safe and pleasant.” 
This passage occurs several times in the inscription. 
The Uittle pointer and the stored food are described as the 
means by which the three western islands had been dis- 
covered. 
The events of former voyages are described very em- 
phatically: on one occasion, it appears, the ships had gone 
so far north that the water skins had been frozen and burst, 
and they fell in with what they supposed to be land, but 
found, on examination, to their great consternation it was 
only ice. 
They proceeded with cautious anxiety by means of the 
sun by day and the seven (react pe, ursa major) by night ; 
and at length saw the land of the three islands; on the first 
of which they saw sheep. 
The concluding passage of the seventh table reminds 
the Phenicians, (for although these people were certainly 
resident in Italy, they are throughout called PUND), that 
the island country which had been discovered would form 
a noble country for trade, protected from hostile aggression 
by the sea; and might hereafter become an asylum (in case 
their own country should be invaded and conquered by an 
enemy of robbing people) to which they might retire in their 
ships, and where their friends and colonists would receive 
them with joy and gratitude in return for the benefits they 
had conferred upon them. 
In the last paragraph we are informed that the inscrip- 
tion was written after three hundred years from the great 
sublerraneous noise and commotion, or the earthquake. 
Of the former unsuccessful attempts to decipher these 
very interesting inscriptions, Sir William Betham referred 
to that of Father Gori, published with a fac simile, and that 
