PHYSICAL CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 15| 



fetwjen the north of Europe and Asia, and subsequently with 

 the Oxus and Indus, so the Samians* and Phocceanst were 

 the first among the Greeks who endeavored to penetrate from 

 tlie basin of the Mediterranean toward the west. 



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

 intercourse had begun, under Psammitichus, with the Greeks, 

 which probably was only the renewal of a former connection. 

 He was driven by easterly stnrms to the island of Platsea, 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 wherever the Greek language was understood on the 

 shores of the Mediterranean. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules 

 (earlier known as the Pillars of Briareus, of ^gseon, and of 

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

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

 cling Oceanus$ 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 S'U7i 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, PhoBnicians, 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., 163, where even the discovery of Tartessus is ascribec 

 to the Phocreans ; but the commercial enterprise of the Phocaeans was 

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

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



X According to a fragment of Fhavorinus, uKtavog (and therefor© 

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

 rians (Spohn, De Nlcephor. Blemm. duohus Opvsculit, 1818, p. 23). My 

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

 9gka and ogh. (See my Examen Critique de V Hist, de la O6ogr., t. i , 

 p 32 and 182.) 



