PHYSICAL CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 501 



It would appear highly probable, from the careful investiga- 

 tions of Gesenius, Benfey, and Lassen, that the Phoenicians, 

 who had been early made acquainted with the periodic preva- 

 lence of the monsoons through their colonies on the Persian 

 Gulf, and their intercourse with the inhabitants of Gerrha, 

 must have visited the western coasts of the Indian Peninsula. 

 Christopher Columbus was even persuaded that Ophir (the El 

 Dorado of Solomon) and Mount Sopora were a portion of East- 

 ern Asia, the Chersonesus Aurea of Ptolemy.* As it appears 

 difficult to form an idea of Western India as a fruitful source 

 of gold, it will, I think, scarcely be necessary to refer to the 

 " gold-seeking ants" (or to the unmistakeable account given 

 by Ctesias of a foundry in which, however, gold and iron 

 were said, according to his account, to be fused together),! it 

 being sufficient to direct attention to the geographical proxi- 

 mity of Southern Arabia, of the Island of Dioscorides (the 

 Diu Zokotora of the moderns, a corruption of the Sanscrit 



sage in Eustathius (Comm. in Iliad, t. iv. p. 225, ed. Lips., 1827), on 

 the sacredness of peacocks in Libya, it has been unjustly inferred that 

 the rw also belonged to Africa. 



* See the remarks of Columbus on Ophir, and el Monte Sopora, "which 

 Solomon's fleet could not reach within a term of three years," in Navarrete, 

 Viages y Descubrimientos que hiciron los Espaholes, t. i. p. 103. In 

 another work, the great discoverer says, still in the hope of reaching Ophir, 

 " the excellence and power of the gold of Ophir cannot be described; he 

 who possesses it does what he will in this world; nay, it even enables him 

 to draw souls from purgatory to paradise" (" llega a que echa las animas 

 al paraiso"), Carta del Almirante, escrita en la Jamaica, 1503; Navar- 

 rete, t. i. p. 309. (Compare my Examen critique, t. i. pp. 70 and 109; 

 t. ii. pp. 38-44; and on the proper duration of the Tarshish voyage, 

 see Keil, op. cit., s. 106.) 



"I* Ctesiae Cnidii Operum Reliquice, ed. Felix Baehr, 1824, cap. iv. 

 and xii. pp. 248, 271, and 300. But the accounts collected by the phy- 

 sician at the Persian Court from native sources, which are not, therefore, 

 altogether to be rejected, refer to districts in the north of India, and 

 from these the gold of the Daradas must have come by many circuitous 

 routes to Abhira, the mouth of the Indus, and the coast of Malabar. 

 (Compare my Asie centrale, t. i. p. 157, and Lassen, Ind. Alterthums- 

 kunde, bd. i. s. 5.) May not the wonderful story related by Ctesias, of 

 an Indian spring, at the bottom of which iron was found, which was very 

 malleable when the fluid gold had run off, have been based on a misun- 

 derstood account of a foundry 1 The molten iron was probably taken for 

 gold owing to its colour, and when the yellow colour had disappeared la 

 cooling, the black mass of iron was found below it. 



