384 DIVISION I. VERTEBRAL ANIMALS. — CLASS I. MAMMALIA. 



ness ; but the Phoenician colonies in Africa surpassed in magnificence and 

 power the parent country. 



According to an ancient inscription in the Phoenician language, which 

 says, " We have fled from the robber Joshua, the son of Nim," and which 

 was discovered in NumidiaA. 1). 540, the first Phoenician colonies in North- 

 ern Africa must have been founded as early as the year 1490 B. C, — a 

 circumstance which is by no means improbable when we consider that in the 

 book of Joshua, Sidon is already mentioned among the mighty princes, and 

 that the Phoenician colonies of Utica, Iladrumetum, Hippo, Leptis, and 

 others, are known to have existed un the northern coast of Africa centuries 

 before Dido there founded the city whose fame was soon to eclipse that of 

 all the older daughters of Sidon and Tyre. 



On the northern coast of Africa, near where the city of Tunis now stands, 

 about the year 878 B. C, and one hundred and twenty-five years before the 

 foundation of Home, she founded the city of Carthage, which soon gave 

 promise of its future greatness. A tribute for the soil was paid the na- 

 tives. The people of the neighboring territories were induced, by the offer 

 of fjreat commercial advantages and of the rights of citizenship, to join the 

 new comers ; and every means for promoting the prosperity of the new set- 

 tlement so effectually taken, that even during the lifetime of Dido the city 

 had acquired so much importance in the eyes of the neighboring nations, 

 that the hand of the princess was sought in marriage by a powerful Numid- 

 ian prince, who threatened to have recourse to violent measures in case his 

 suit were not accepted. To secure the independence of her new-founded 

 city, and to keep her faith to her deceased husband, Dido, acting in accord- 

 ance with the received opinions of her country, and the principles of her 

 religion, threw herself into the flames of a funereal pyre, which she had 

 ordered to lie lighted for her, and was ever afterwards worshipped as a deity 

 by her people. 



The first periods of Phoenician greatness are veiled in the mysterious dark- 

 ness of an unknown past; yet so much is certain, that their date must have 

 been very remote ; as, according to the accounts which Herodotus received 

 from the priests, the foundation of Tyre took place thirty centuries before 

 the Christian era. 



Long before the expedition of the Argonauts, the Phoenicians had already 

 founded colonies on the Bithynian coast of the Black Sea (Pronectus Bi- 

 thynian) ; and that at a very early time they must have steered through the 

 Straits of Gades into the Atlantic is proved by the fact, that as far back as 

 the eleventh century before Christ they founded the towns of Gades and 

 Tartessus on the western coast of Southern Spain. Penetrating farther and 

 farther to the north, they discovered Britain, where they established their 



