s brought from Phoenecia the
letters which had been invented and adopted there for the representation
and expression of articulate sounds; and by the combination of these
letters to transmit and perpetuate human ideas. There is scarce a race
of savages in our day where the mass of the body politic are as
profoundly ignorant as were the great body of the Greek people a
thousand years before Christ.

Even those men who made such acquisitions of knowledge as were possible
in that day, could only learn from the lips of their imperfectly trained
teacher, and by travel to those countries which the barbarous condition
of the world allowed them to visit; and even after the learned men of
the Greek Islands came to know the power of letters, how small must have
been the amount of knowledge existing in the world, and how slow must
have been its spread amongst the untaught commonalty of the then Greek
world? In the day when the Phoenician ship Argo made a voyage to
Colchis, at the east end of the Black Sea, it so fired the imagination
of the Greek poets that they dreamed of the voyage and composed poems
about it for centuries.

Indeed it was not until the Romans, just before the Christian Era, had
subdued all the borders of the historic Mediterranean Sea, that free
intercourse amongst the inhabitants prevailed. Up to that period every
people, as a rule, carefully guarded all knowledge of their own wealth,
and of their own acts and possessions from the rest of mankind, instead
of making public expositions to attract the attention of the outside
world to their useful achievements, and they sometimes passed laws for
inflicting the severest punishments upon citizens who should reveal to
the outside world the locations, nature, or extent, or value of their
possessions.

Still, we glean from the ancient writers the following announcements.

1. That ancient book entitled "The Book of Wonders," ascribed to
Aristotle, contains the following: "When the Carthagenians, who were
masters of the western ocean, observed that many traders and other men,
attracted by the fertility of the soil and the pleasant climate, had
fixed there their homes, they feared that the knowledge of this land
should reach other nations, a great concourse to it of men from the
various lands of the earth would follow, that the conditions of life,
then so happy on that island, would not only be unfavorably affected,
but the Carthagenian Empire itself suffer injury, an