PHVS^IOAL CONTEMPLATION OF THK UNIVERSE. 151 



between the north of Europe and Asia, and subsequently with 

 the Oxus and Indus, so the Samians* and Phoca;anst were 

 the first among the Greeks who endeavored to penetrate from 

 the basin of the Mediterranean toward the west. 



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

 intercourse had begun, under Psammitichus, M'^ith the Greeks, 

 which probably was only the renewal of a former connection. 

 He was driven by easterly st^^rms to the island of Platasa, 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 v.'herever the Greek language was understood on the 

 shores of the Mediterranean. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules 

 (earlier known as the Pillars of Briareus, of JEgseon, and of 

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

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

 cling Oceannsij: 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 Su7Z Lake was 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 iene- 

 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., 1G3, where even the discovery of Tartessus is ascribet 

 to the PhoccBans ; but the commercial euterpiise of the Phocceaus was 

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

 Geogr. der Griecheti und Romer, th. 1, i., s. 40). 



X According to a fragment of Phavorinus, UK<-avQ^ (and therefore 

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

 rians (Spohn, De Nicephor. Blemm. duobus Opvsculis, 1818, p. 23). My 

 brother was of opinion that they were connected with the Sanscrit roots 

 '*gha and ogh. (See my Examen Criiique de V Hist, de la Geogr., t. i 

 p 33 and 182.) 



