. And while the
Carthagenians were engaged in making voyages to this land, and some had
even settled there on account of the fertility of the soil, the Senate
decreed that no one thereafter, under penalty of death, should voyage
thither." Aristotle was born three hundred and eighty-four years before
Christ.

8. Diodorus of Sicily, who lived in the century preceding the Christian
Era, says in his Book 5,--19 and 20, that it was the "Phoenicians
instead of the Carthagenians who were cast upon a most fertile island
opposite Africa, where the climate was that of perpetual spring, and
that the land was the proper habitation for gods rather than men."

He speaks of the continent, however, at length and with great detail,
enumerating its fertile valleys and navigable rivers, its rich and
abundant fruits and supply of game, its valuable forests and its genial
climate.

9. Pliny quotes Statius Sebosus, in his volume 2, page 106, Bohn, as
saying that _the two Hesperides are forty-two days' sail from the coast
of Africa_.

THE PHOENICIAN PEOPLE WERE EQUAL TO THE DISCOVERIES ON THE WESTERN
CONTINENT, IF WE JUDGE THEM BY WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHED.

The prophet Isaiah, writing soon after seven hundred and fifty years
before Christ, in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy, gives us a
pretty good idea of the unlimited commerce and the unlimited prosperity
of the merchants of Tyre. Among other things he says the following,
speaking of the City "_Whose antiquity is of ancient days_." He calls
the City "The Crowning City," "whose merchants are princes, whose
traffickers are the honorable of the earth." The wealth and luxury of
Tyre was eternally injurious to the Jewish people from the time of their
return from Egypt to Canaan to the carrying away of Israel to Babylon in
the later days. The Jewish husbandman, dazzled by the luxuries of Tyre
and Sidon, was affected as those in more moderate circumstances are in
later days, by the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and were
building groves in high places under which to worship, as did the
priests of Baal in Palestine, and under the oaks in the northwest of
Europe, where they acquired the name of Druids. They forsook the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth and Astarte,
the Phoenician Venus.

They even sacrificed their children to Moloch, the relentless fire god,
as Baal appeared in his sterner characteristics. But upon the loss of
we