and shaggy as the goats: they live on the produce of their flocks, and lead a pastoral and wandering life: they possess tin, lead, and peltry, which they exchange with the merchants for pottery, salt, and brazen goods. In the early ages, the Phoenicians of Gades monopolised this commerce, concealing from other nations the course thither; but the Romans, that they might obtain a knowledge of these harbours, following a Phoenician master of a ship, the latter ran his ship upon a shallow shore, and although he suffered shipwreck equally with his pursuers, he escaped with life, and received from the public a remuneration for the cargo, which he had lost. The Romans, however, by repeated attempts, learned the navigation to these islands. When P. Crassus sailed thither afterwards, and remarked that the meals were not dug to a considerable depth in the earth, and that the peaceable inhabitants from the abundance of the precious ore were inclined to navigation, he taught the art to these eager disciples; although a sea wider than the ocean which embraces Britain was to be necessarily crossed." The monstrous fishes of Avienus are undesignedly described by Chandler, in his Travels in Asia Minor, 4to p. 31. when he was in the same vicinity to Andalusia. "On our entry into the Mediterranean, the vast assemblage of bulky monsters was beyond measure amazing; some leaping up, as if aiming to amuse us; some approaching the ship, as it were to be seen by us, floating together, abreast, and half out of the water. We counted in one company fourteen, of the species called by the sailors The Botile-Nose, each, as we guessed, about twelve feet long. These are almost shapeless, looking black and oily, with a large thick fin on the back, no eyes or mouth discernible, the head rounded at the extremity, and so joined with the body, as to render it difficult to distinguish where the one ends, or the other begins; but on the upper part is a hole about an inch and an half in diameter, from which, at regular intervals, the log-like being blows out water accompanied with a puff, audible at some distance." As it may be objected to me, that Himilco is describing the whale, not of the Spanish, but of the Polar sea, I will add a delineation of the latter, extracted from the journals of ships, which sail in that trade. The Greenland whale, that enormous inhabitant of the deep, who requires an ocean to swim in, is equally wonderful in every point of view; in the rapidity of his motion, as in the dimensions of his body, in the quantity, as in the usefulness of his fat. His motion is so incredibly swift, that he shoots by a ship under a press of sail, like an arrow passing a stationary tree, at the rate of 15 or 20 miles in the hour. His side-fins playing in any voluntary direction either depress, or raise his vast body perpendicularly or obliquely and in either manner, in an instant. Tranquil and undis turbed, he floats at his ease, one tenth of his corpulent body above the surface of the green waves; his tail-fin like an oar actually sculling along with immense sweeps his buoyant form. A whale, struck with an harpoon, spouts a stream of blood, six or eight feet high, against the mast, exhibiting a curious rain-bow. In the agonies of death, he dashes a mass of water around, and causes a temporary and local tempest; crushing any boat with a stroke of his tailfin, or carrying away any opposing rudder: curling around his wide body many fathom of cord, and heaving up in his fury several massive sheets of neighbouring ice. "Wilt thou play with him as with a tame bird? or wilt thou bind him for the maidens ?-Will not any one be cast down at the very sight of him? Upon earth there is not his like. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot; he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him, one would think the deep to be hoary." On the earth there is not his like. The elephant rarely reaches eighteen feet in height or twenty in length. The most formidable serpents of Africa or India seldom measure thirty feet, and are equally slender in proportion of the length to their thickness, as the common worm or the dung-hill snake. But the whale stretches out its huge form to seventy or eighty feet: which is two thirds of the length of any vessel employed in the trade to Greenland, and triple the size of a moderate room. His height or perpendicular thickness is eleven feet; nearly the stature of two tall men. His circumference, though his form is not accurately circular but oblate, may be estimated to be two thirds larger than his diameter depth, or in plainer language, thirty feet; the size of an ox! Let the reader multiply such a girth by such a length of body, and he will obtain a mathematical account of its solid contents:-the largest oak is scarcely equal to it in mass: the tallest and widest mast sinks in the comparison to a wand, to a walking-staff! A large ox weighs only 100 stone: a whale has been computed at 70 tons: or the draught of fifty horses. The bulk or girth of it is as large as the bulk of a sloop; the blubber taken off weighs thirty tons, or a third of its bulk. When he is killed, tow him on the next shore support his jaws by two long poles, (those jaws which erected, and meeting in a point, form the two sides of a barn!) a boat may sail as into a creek, into his expanded mouth: a man may sit in it, as in the cave of a rock or fasten the same dead animal to a ship by long cables; and its body, before it be stripped or uncased of the blubber, is so swoln by the air generated in its bowels from its putrefying state, that it heaves itself four feet above the height of the salt wave, rising a mountain of flesh....Though of its valuable blubber (sweet, savoury sound to many a commercial man!) only fifteen or eighteen inches in depth be taken, yet the body is so vast, that one whale in a late year yielded twenty-one tons of oil; that is, a quantity of melted fat, sufficient for the draught of ten horses, (the strongest of animals in Europe) formed merely the exterior covering and coat of this prince of fishes! what then was the weight of his whole body when alive, and full of air, full of water?....One fish has frequently afforded a sufficiency of blubber to fill every cask in a small ship, and to compose a singular cargo. Its crank or remaining carcase, loosened from the cables, and dropped with a loud shout of the crew into the ocean, drives to a distance, and is soon surrounded by ravenous bears, by carrion birds, and a variety of fishes, and the ravenous tribe of Esquimaux Indians, eaters of raw flesh: thus affording to the rational and irrational part of the creation a treasure during life, and a banquet by its death. Cæsar in the 1st Book of his Civil War describes these boats: "Carinæ et statumina ex levi materiâ fiebant; reliquum corpus ex viminibus contextum coriis integebatur." A modern tourist explains this vessel to be the Coracle: "the fishermen in Caermarthenshire," he says, "continue to use them: they are ribbed with light laths or with split twigs in the manner of basket-work, and are covered with a raw hide to prevent the leakage: their shape is oval, or obiong, and their bottom flat or rounded: when inverted, they resemble the shells of enormous turtles." Pliny adds; "that in the isle Mictis [or properly Victis,] the isle of Wight, the Britons used in a voyage of six days [navigiis vitilibus] vessels bound with osier." Strabo in the third book on Spain, and at the 155th page observes; "that the natives use a boat formed from skins as far as to Brutus, on account of the inundations and the marshes." In a monkish annalist of the dark ages it is recorded that "an Irish saint and preacher passed from thence into Wales in a coracle." Mr. Tennant, in his Indian Recreations, Vol. 2. p. 286,7. says: Pliny speaking of this tree [the Bamboo] has been guilty of an exaggeration, or perhaps a mistake, in asserting that a single one is sufficient to make a boat: Navigiorum etiam vicem præstant (si credimus) singula internodia: the truth is that, when made into a frame, and covered with a hide, it served this purpose in the same manner, as the Corucles of the ancient Britons; and in this way it was frequently used by the troops of Hyder-Ally in crossing rivers: the bamboo in its natural state being no thicker than a man's thigh, cannot singly supply the place of a canoe." V. 154. [Ophiusa]-hæc dicta primo V. 155. Locos et arva œstrymnicis habitantibus, V. 156. Post multa serpens effugavit incolas, Vacuamque glebam nominis fecit sui. V. 103. Ast hinc duobus in Sacram (sic insulam V. 109. dixêre prisci) solibus cursus rati est. V. 110. Hæc inter undas multum cespitis jacet, V. 111. Eamque latè gens Hiberno rum colit. Sacra, or in the Greek içà, is the same as 'Ipvn. Orosius observes; "that the island Hibernia, situated between Spain and Britain, is narrow in point of space, but is valuable from the qualities of its soil and its sky. It is tenanted by the tribes of the Scotch." P. Mela in the third book remarks, that "the inhabitants [of Ireland] are rude and less acquainted with any of the virtues, than other nations; in some degree skilful, but void of filial piety." Inscriptions found at Ancient Saguntum. 153 Tacitus, in the life of Agricola, asserts, that Ireland is less than Britain, but exceeds in magnitude all the islands of the Mediterranean. The soil, the climate, the manners and genius of the inhabitants differ little from those of Britain: by means of merchants resorting thither for the sake of commerce, the harbours and approaches to the coast are well known." INSCRIPTIONS FOUND AT ANCIENT E We have been favored with the following additional Inscriptions. lately brought into this country, and hope to be able to give some explanation of them in a future number. The following rules are collected from some of the most distin guished Spanish antiquaries. 1. The characters both of the Celtiberians, and of the Turdetani, are to be chiefly referred to the most ancient Greek and Etruscan. 2. There are several letters admitted to be doubtful. 3. There are double letters, which frequently recur. 4. The vowels are sometimes expressed, but often are to be supplied, 5. Words are seldom written at full length. 1 Aristotle De Mundo says : ἐν τούτῳ [ωκεάνῳ] γε μὲν νῆσοι μέγισταί τε τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι δύο, Βρετάννικαι λεγόμεναι, Αλβίων καὶ Ιέρνη. And in the Argonautics of Orpheus (line 1178) we have the following passage: αγκαιος δ' οἴακας ἐπισταμένως ἐπίτεινε πάρ' δ ̓ ἄρα νῆσον ἄμειβεν Ιέρνιδα· καὶ οἱ ὄπισθεν οὐδέ τις ἔγνω σαῖσιν ἐνὶ φρεσὶν ὅππου ἄρ ̓ ἔσμεν, |