SECTION 11. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

 DISTANT LANDS (EARLY TIMES TO THE 

 CLOSE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY) 



Voyages of discovery go back to times whose history is 

 inextricably mixed with legend. Phoenician merchants 

 sailed over the Mediterranean, and beyond the pillars 

 of Hercules to the Fortunate Islands and the western 

 shores of Spain, bringing to Tyre and Sidon the products 

 of Arabia, Egypt and India, as well as of northern 

 countries rarely visited except by barbarian traders. 

 Herodotus, the first Greek historian, travelled in Persia, 

 Egypt and Scythia, and was able to gratify the curiosity 

 of his countrymen by telling them, among many things 

 of greater importance, about the crocodile of the Nile, 

 and the artificially impregnated date-palm of Babylon. 

 Ctesias, a Greek physician, who had lived at the court 

 of that Artaxerxes, whom Cyrus the younger tried to 

 dispossess, wrote accounts of Persia and India, in which 

 elephants, parrots and bamboos are noticed. Greek 

 armies were led by Alexander to the Punjab, returning 

 by the Indus and the Persian gulf. It is just possible 

 that from this last source of information Aristotle 

 learned what he knew about the anatomy of the ele- 

 phant, and how the Bactrian camel differed from the 

 Arabian. 



