forbids an account of their ways and songs. I
hope what I have told you of the winter birds will induce you to study
and observe more closely their almost human ways.
SOMETHING ABOUT LIGHT-HOUSES.
You have all heard of the Seven Wonders of the World; did you know that
two of these wonders were veritable Light-houses?
About 300 B. C., Cheres, the disciple of Lysippus, cast the famous brazen
Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the Sun God Apollo, and erected it at the
entrance of the harbor where it was used as a Light-house, the flames
which crowned the head of the Sun God by night serving to guide wandering
barks into his Rhodian waters.
[Illustration: FOURTH ORDER LIGHT-HOUSE, AT PENFIELD REEF, L. I. SOUND.]
For eighty years its hundred brazen feet towered superbly above port and
town, and then it was partly destroyed by an earthquake. For nearly a
thousand years the sacred image remained unmolested where it had fallen,
by Greek and Roman, Pagan and Christian; but at last the Saracen owners
of Rhodes, caring as little for its religious association as for its
classic antiquity, sold the brass of it for the great sum of L36.000, to
the Jewish merchants of Edessa.
Just about the time that the Colossus was set astride the Rhodian harbor,
King Ptolemy Philadelphus caused a noble tower of superb white stone,
four hundred feet high, to be erected by an architect named Sostrasius,
son of Dixiphanes, at the entrance to the port of Alexandria, which was a
bran-new busy city in those days, a mere mushroom growth in that old, old
Egypt, where the upstart Ptolomies were reigning on the throne of the
Pharaohs.
It is said that this Sostrasius didn't want his own name to be forgotten,
so he carved it deep in the stone of the tower and covered it over with
plaster whereon he inscribed by royal command:
"King Ptolemy to the Gods, the Saviours, for the benefit of sailors."
Josephus tells us that the light, kept burning on the top of this Pharos,
as it was called, probably from a word that signifies _fire_, was visible
for forty miles at sea. For a thousand years it shone constantly until
the Alexandrian Wonder likewise fell a prey to time and the Saracens.
The words Pharos-Phare, Faro, etc., have been adopted into more than one
European language to express Light-house or sea-light.
Some persons suppose that great mirrors must have been used to direct the
light on the Pharos and keep it from being lost, but it i
|