rious to note how closely the employment
of the cocoa bean, in ancient Mexico and of wampum in North America,
as the staple currency, fulfilled the purpose recognized as
desirable, by Plato.

143 At the last moment I learn that fragments of AEgean pottery lately
found at Abydos in tombs of the Egyptian kings of the first dynasty,
by Prof. Flinders Petrie are considered to prove that, "Grecian
merchants sailed the seas in 4500 B.C., ... a conclusion further
borne-out by the pictures of vessels with 60 oarsmen, vessels quite
large enough for crossing the Mediterranean, which have been seen on
prehistoric memorials of the oldest inhabitants of Egypt"
(Rawnsley). In this connection it is interesting to learn, from
Professor Sayce, that the Phoenician galley was the model of the
Greek one, that it was at Carthage that a ship, with more than three
banks of oars, was first built, and that its pilots steered by the
pole star, not, like the Greeks, by the Great Bear (Ancient Empires
of the East, p. 205).

144 An interesting interpretation of this somewhat obscure sentence is
obtained by collating it with the conception of "the revolving eye
of the Norse world mill-stone which was directly above Oergelmer and
through which the waters flowed to and fro from the great fountain
of the Universe mountains" (p. 472). The analogy is strengthened by
the fact that the mountainous region in which Kyrene was situated
has always been noted for its fertility, the water, from the
mountains enclosing its plains, settling in pools and lakes,
affording a constant supply, during the summer months, to the Arabs
who frequent it. The feature of Kyrene, most renowned in antiquity,
was its inexhaustible Fountain of Apollo, and travellers describe
how, to this day, the Bedouin Arabs flock to it when their supply of
water and herbage fails in the interior. Grote states that the same
circumstance must have operated in ancient times to hold the nomadic
Libyans in a sort of dependence upon Kyrene (Grote, _op. cit._ vol.
IV, p. 37).

The realization that an inexhaustible fountain of water meant life
to primitive nomadic people, enables us to understand the expression
"fountain of life" and the constant associations of the sacred
central mountain with p