PHYSICAL CONTEMPLAllON OF THE UNIVERSE. 141 



ilization is most deeply rooted, and from whom we have de- 

 rived a considerable portion of our early knowledge of other 

 nations, and of our views regarding the universe. We have 

 considered the basin of the Mediterranean in its characteristic 

 configuration and position, and the influence of these relations 

 on the commercial intercourse established with the western 

 coasts of Africa, the extreme north, and the Indo- Arabian 

 Sea. No portion of the earth has been the theater of greater 

 changes of power, or of greater or more animated activity un- 

 der the influence of mental guidance. This movement was 

 transmitted far and enduringly by the Greeks and Romans, 

 especially after the latter had destroyed the Phcenicio-Cartha- 

 ginian power. That which we term the beginning of history 

 is, therefore, only the period when later generations awoke to 

 self-consciousness. It is one of the advantages of the present 

 age that, by the brilliant progress that has been made in gen- 

 eral and comparative philology, by the careful investigation 

 of monuments and their more certain interpretation, the views 

 of the historical inquirer are daily enlarged, and the strata of 

 remote antiquity gradually opened, as it were, before our eyes. 

 Besides the civilized nations of the Mediterranean which we 

 have just enumerated, there are many others v/ho show traces 

 of ancient cultivation ; among these we may mention the 

 Phrygians and Lycians in Western Asia, and the Turduli and 

 Turdetani in the extreme West.* Of the latter, Strabo ob- 

 serves, " they are the most cultivated of all the Iberians ; they 

 employ the art of writing, and have written books containing 

 memorials of ancient times, and also poems and laws set in 

 verse, for which they claim an antiquity of six thousand years." 

 I have dwelt on these separate examples in order to show 

 how much of ancient cultivation, even among European na- 

 tions, has been lost without our being able to discover any 

 trace of its existence, and how the history of the earliest con- 

 templation of the universe must continue to be limited to a 

 very narrow compass. 



Beyond the forty-eighth degree of latitude, north of the Sea 

 of Azof and of the Caspian, between the Don, the Wolga, and 

 the Jaik, where the latter flows from the southern auriferous 



* Strabo, lib. iii., p. 139, Casaub. Compare Wilhelra von Humboldt, 

 Ueber die Urbewohner Hispaniens, 1821, 8. 123 und 131-136. The Iberian 

 alphabet has been successfully investigated in our own times by M. de 

 Saulcy; the Phrygian, by the ingenious discoverer of arrow-headed 

 writing, Grotefend ; and the Lyciar by Sir Charles Fellowes. (Coiu^ 

 pare Ross, Hellenika, bd. i., s. xvi.) 



