accurately
determined, it would fix exactly the extent of the voyages of the
Carthaginians in this direction. The weed alluded to is probably the fucus
natans, or gulf-weed.

Hitherto the knowledge that the ancients possessed of the habitable world,
had not been collected by any writer, and is to be gathered entirely from
short, vague, and evidently imperfect narrations, scattered throughout a
great number of authors. Herodotus has been celebrated as the father of
history; he may with equal justice be styled the father of geographical
knowledge: he flourished about 474 years before Christ. In dwelling upon
the advances to geographical knowledge which have been derived from him, it
will be proper and satisfactory, before we explain the extent and nature of
them, to give an account of the sources from which he derived his
information; those were his own travels, and the narrations or journals of
other travellers. A great portion of the vigour of his life seems to have
been spent in travelling; the oppressive tyranny of Lygdamis over
Halicarnassus, his native country, first induced or compelled him to
travel; whether he had not also imbibed a portion of the commercial
activity and enterprize which distinguished his countrymen, is not known,
but is highly probable. We are not informed whether his fortune were such
as to enable him, without entering into commercial speculations, to support
the expences of his travels; it is evident, however, from the extent of his
travels, as well as from the various, accurate, and, in many cases, most
important information, which he acquired, that these expences must have
been very considerable. From his work it is certain that he was endowed
with that faculty of eliciting the truth from fabulous, imperfect, or
contradictory evidence, at all times so necessary to a traveller, and
indispensably so at the period when he travelled, and in most of the
countries where his enquiries and his researches were carried on. His great
and characteristic merit consists in freeing his mind from the opinions
which must have previously occupied it;--in trusting entirely either to
what e himself saw, or to what he learned from the best authority;--always,
however, bringing the information acquired in this latter mode to the test
of his own observation and good sense. It is from the united action and
guidance of these two qualifications--individual observation and experience
gained by most patient and diligen