to place, and taking up their abode wherever night overtook them. The death of Hercules in Spain, however, according to the tradition of the Africans, led in a short time to the dispersion of his army, which was composed of a great variety of nations, and influenced by commanders who were actuated by discordant views and conflicting interests. Those that were Medes, Persians, and Armenians, sailed over into Africa, and took possession of that part of the country on the coast of the Mediterranean sea. The Persians, however, ultimately settled nearer the Atlantic, and converted their ships into houses, by turning them upside down, because there was no timber in the country, and they had no intercourse with Spain, partly on account of the distance, and partly because they did not understand the language spoken in that country. These insensibly mixed with the Gætulians by intermarriages; and because they were continually shifting from place to place, trying the goodness of the soil, they called themselves Numidians, which Sallust evidently regards as equivalent to Nomades. He concludes by remarking, that the houses of the Numidian peasants, were still like the bulls of ships, of an oblong form, with coverings raised in the middle, and bending at each end. (Be Bello Jugurthino, c. 21.)

III. The expedition of Hercules into Spain, the foundation on which the above passage rests, cannot be said to possess much of an historical character. As the Grecian Hercules is altogether a creation of mythology, so his exploits are in every respect fabulous. Hercules is unquestionably one among the innumerable Asiatic names of the sun; and his twelve labours contain some obscure allusion to the passage of that luminary through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. At the same time, the above passage of Sallust, in all probability, darkly embodies the historical fact of an emigration from Asia, or an invasion of Europe from that continent. Hercules, or the sun, being put by metonymy for the East, or the sun-rising, in the same way as Cadmus, formed from the Hebrew word Kedem; and hence in the classical writers Heraclidæ and

Cadmeans for Asiatics or Orientals. Indeed we actually meet with such a tradition in history, or that which has hitherto been received as such; as Megasthenes mentions Sesostris the Egyptian, and Tearchon the Ethiopian, as extending their conquests as far as Europe, Navocodrosorus (Nebuchadnezzar), the most renowned among the Chaldeans as exceeding Hercules, and carrying his arms as far as the pillars, and subsequently leading his army from Spain to Thrace and Pontus, while Idanthursus, the Scythian, overran all Asia as far as Egypt. (Megasthenes, Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 215.)

IV. If this army, which Sallust describes as crossing from Spain into Africa, was really composed of Medes, Persians, and Armenians, I should say that it had clearly left a trace of itself in the word Numidia, formed from the Persic Nu or No, new, and Media their original country. The name of the Gætulians, whom Sallust describes as the original inhabitants of Africa, seems to be formed from the Greek word Ge earth, and the Latin verb Fero, tuli, in the sense of to produce; Gætulians, or earth born, corresponding with the Greek Autochthones, and the Latin Aborigines. Herodotus describes the Ausenses as bordering on those Libyans who cultivated the earth and had houses, were distinguished by the name of Maxyes, and pretended to be descended from the Trojans. (Lib. iv. c. 191.) Connecting this with the passage in Sallust, one cannot but conjecture that the word Maxyes may be cognate with the Persic Mazu and Mazah, a harrow, and that the fact of their being agriculturalists was contained in the name. The indefatigable Herodotus also mentions another African word, which is undoubtedly of Asiatic etymology. He says that Zegeries, in the African tongue, has the same meaning with the Greek word for hills, which can hardly be any thing else than the Chaldee Jegar, and the Syriac Jagar, a hill. In the well-known parting between Laban and Jacob, after they had raised a mound of stones, the former pronounced the words Jegar Sahadutha, this heap be a witness, or be this heap a witness. (Genesis, 31-47.)

The name of Mount Atlas in Mauritania, is certainly older than the age of Homer, as it occurs in the first book of the Odyssey, and it is as certainly an Arabic word. I do not mean a conjectural word, such as etymologists are sometimes accused of inventing, but one which is to be found, I believe, in every Arabic dictionary. In that of Richardson its signification is a sphere, the heavens; so that there cannot be a doubt that Atlas was to the early Arabians, and the inhabitants of that part of Africa, what Ouranos was to the Greeks, and Coelus to the Romans; that is, one of the oldest and most venerable of their deities.

v. The languages of Africa are supposed to amount to one hundred and fifty, of which Adelung has given scanty specimens, consisting of a word or two, of about one hundred. But of all these, with the exception of the subdivisions of the Egyptian language, the Coptic, the Sahidic, and the. Oasitic, together with the Punic, there are very few words that I can identify as having the most remote analogy with the languages of Europe or Asia. In connexion with this subject, Dr. Prichard's Work on the Eastern Origin of the Celta, contains the following curious passage: -" In Africa a remarkable and interesting fact was the discovery of a nation occupying the whole northern region of that continent, to which the Kabyles of Mauritania and the Tuarik of the Great Desert belong, and whose branches extend from the Oasis of Siwah on the eastern, to the mountains of Atlas and even to the Canary Islands on the western side. The Guanches, the old inhabitants of those islands whose remains are said to lie embalmed in the mummy caves of Teneriffe, spoke, as it appears, a dialect of the same language as the Kabyles and Berbers. The Felatahs, who have spread themselves over the interior countries of Nigritia, have been traced, by a similar investigation, to the mountainous districts above the Senegal, where the Foulahs who speak the same language, have long been known to Europeans as a people in many respect distinguishable from the Negroes. To the southward of the equator, a connexion still more extended

has been discovered among the natives tribes, across the whole of the same continent from Caffraria and the Mozambique coast on the Indian Ocean, to the countries which border on the Atlantic and form a part of the region termed the empire of Congo." (p. 7.)

VI. Park's Travels in Africa contain a tolerably copious vocabulary of the Mandingo language, from which I shall insert a short extract, principally with a view of pointing out the extraordinary fact how very widely the Arabic appears to have been diffused over the African continent from the very earliest ages.

Mandingo Words.

Boulla, the arm and hand

Kittaba, a book

Ding, a child.

Dingding, an infant

Analogies.

Bal (Arabic and Persic), the arm.
Kitab, Arabic.

In Hebrew, the superlative degree

is frequently formed by writing the positive twice. In the first chapter of Genesis, we have Tob, good, and Tobtob, very good.

Banko, earth.

Teelee Gee, the west; literally, sun water, i. e. where the sun sets.

I. THE above passage of Seneca appears to contain a prophecy that new continents would be discovered, and the boundaries of the habitable world be thereby enlarged; but as most prophecies have been found to be long posterior to the events they pretend to predict, we ought perhaps rather to regard the words of my motto as containing an obscure tradition and doubtful knowledge of the existence of a western continent, at the period when the poet wrote.

II. The fables respecting the Atlantic island lead us to the same conclusion. Marcellus, as quoted by Proculus, says that such, and so great an island formerly existed, is recorded by some of the historians, who have treated of the concerns of the outward sea (the Atlantic Ocean). For they say that in their times there were seven islands situated in that sea, which were sacred to Persephone; and three others of an immense magnitude, one of which was consecrated to Pluto, another to Ammon, and that which was situated between them, to Poseidon; the size of this last was no less than one thousand stadia.

The inhabitants of this island preserved a tradition handed down from their ancestors, concerning the existence of the