four separate sub-commissions were issued, the respective members of which were, 1. To inspect every barrack and hospital, and to devise and execute the necessary works with such expedition as the available resources of the country may permit, until every barrack and hospital shall have been brought into a healthy and satisfactory condition; 2. To draw up a scheme for re-organizing the office of Director-general of the Medical Department, and for regulating the promotions and revising the regulations of the department; 3. To draw up a scheme for the proposed Military Medical School; and 4. To arrange the basis and forms on which the statistics of disease and mortality in the army are henceforth to be collected and recorded; for the vital statistics of the army should be so kept as to enable the Government to compare the rates of sickness and death in the army with those of civil life, and with its own rates at previous periods, to judge of the comparative healthiness of every station and every barrack, to trace sickness and mortality to their various causes, to ascertain the comparative influence of each, and to take the precautions and apply the remedies which the case may require. The reports from the medical officers should tell the commander of the forces in the field not only what is the past and existing state of sickness and mortality in his army; but what are the causes of them; and for what time, at a continuance of the same rate, and with what reinforcements, he can maintain his army in the field of these four sub-commissions the public are now eagerly looking for the fruits.

The cordial unanimity with which the House of Commons. ratified the Report of the Commissioners, by passing the resolutions moved on the 11th of May by Lord Ebrington, leaves us no cause for fear that any unreasonable delay or unexpected obstacle will be allowed to retard the reforms proposed by the Commissioners for the removal of existing abuses; while their recommendations (which we have described) for placing the soldier under effective sanitary surveillance, as regards every particular by which his health or his life may be endangered, excepting the fire of the enemy, in whatever circumstances he may be placed, -whether in camp, in barrack, or in hospital,—will provide adequate security for the future. The department constitutionally responsible for the vigilant control of the Estimates will, in carrying into effect the unanimous decision of that branch of the Legislature which holds the purse-strings of the nation, be bound to take due care that the soldier's health shall not henceforth be sacrificed either to a short-sighted and narrow-minded parsimony, or to a wasteful expenditure of the public money on the ill-considered schemes of projectors.

ART. VI.-1. Kelten und Germanen, eine historische Untersuchung. Von ADOLF HOLTZMANN. Stuttgart: 1855. One vol. 8vo.

2. Das ethnographische Verhältniss der Kelten und Germanen, nach den Ansichten der Alten und den sprachlichen Ueberresten dargelegt von Dr. H. B. C. BRANDes. Leipzig: 1857. One vol. 8vo.

IN attempting to reproduce a distinct and precise impression of the social and intellectual life of the ancient Greeks and Romans, it is necessary to keep steadily in view the narrowness of eir geographical horizon, and the slow rate at which it was enlarged by commerce, conquest, and scientific discovery. At the time of Herodotus, the Greeks had, in Asia, become acquainted with a considerable part of the Persian empire; and, in Africa, the Nile had carried them into the interior of Egypt; but to the west and north their knowledge did not reach much beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. With the chief part of Europe, the Greeks of that period were wholly unacquainted; they had never sailed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; the western shores of Spain and France, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, were as unknown to them as America or Australia.

The great hero, Hercules, who was conceived in the light of a civiliser and benefactor of mankind; as destroying wild beasts, as punishing tyrants, as opening roads over impassable regions, was believed to have made the Straits of Gibraltar the term of his expedition to the far west, and to have there erected two columns, as memorials of his extreme course. These pillars, beyond which, according to Pindar, every thing was inaccessible and unknown, were converted, by the rationalising tendencies of the later Greeks, into natural objects; into rocks, promontories, or islands. The early Greeks, however, understood the Pillars of Hercules in a literal sense, as they are represented on the pillar dollars of old and new Spain. The same hero was supposed to have erected similar columns on the shores of the Pontus; and thus Euripides speaks of the Black Sea and Mount Atlas, as the proverbial extremities of the known world to the east and west. Even the cautious and sceptical Aristotle believed that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was unfit for navigation. Practically, the ancients regarded the Mediterranean as a lake, and their navigation would not have been perceptibly affected if its western, like its eastern, extremity had been closed by an isthmus.

The voyage of the Argonauts is purely fabulous, and no inferences can be drawn from it respecting the history of commerce or geographical discovery; but it is certain that the Greeks of Asia Minor had, at an early period, sailed into the Black Sea, and Hellenic colonies had begun to be planted on its coasts so early as the seventh century before Christ. The Cimmerian Bosporus and the Palus Mæotis are mentioned by Eschylus; and an epigram, attributed to Simonides, alludes to the distant Tanais. Herodotus was well acquainted with this river (the Don), which he describes as flowing into the Lake Mæotis, and as dividing Europe from Asia. But the Caspian Sea lay beyond the range of the distinct vision of the Greeks. Artemidorus, of Ephesus, a geographer who lived about 100 B.C., declared that the country east of the Tanais was unexplored. Even after the expedition of Alexander, the Caspian was believed to be a gulf of the Northern Ocean, with which it communicated by a long narrow channel. The Greeks were ignorant of the Volga: this river first occurs under the name of the Rha, in the writings of geographers and historians who lived under the Roman empire. Pliny, indeed, informs us that, with regard to the Palus Mæotis, his contemporaries believed it to be connected with the Great Northern Sea. Some thought that it was a gulf of the ocean, while others held it to be a lagoon, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. So imperfectly acquainted were the Greeks with the geography of the lands to the north of their own country, that in the reign of Philip the Fifth, of Macedon (181 B.C.), it was generally believed that the Black Sea and the Adriatic, the Danube and the Alps, could be seen simultaneously from the top of Hæmus.*

Herodotus is ignorant of the Alps as a chain of mountains: he calls the Alpis a river flowing northwards from Upper Italy, and falling into the Danube; he likewise describes Pyrene as a town near the sources of the Danube. It was, be says, unknown, in his time, whether Europe was bounded by sea on the west; he expressly states that he had been unable to ascertain this fact from the testimony of any eyewitness, notwithstanding his endeavours to obtain information on the subject. Polybius, the consistent enemy of exaggeration and imposture, declares that, in his time (about 150 B.C.), nothing was known of the northern parts of Europe, lying between Narbo, in Gaul, to the west, and the river Tanais, to the east. The prevailing belief of that period was that the

* See Livy, xl. 21, Mela, ii. 2.

ocean stretched across the north of Europe, from the neighbourhood of the Caspian and the Sea of Azoff, to the Straits of Gibraltar. That the belief in a circumfluous ocean, connecting the northern shores of India with Germany, continued to hold its ground for some time longer, appears from a curious anecdote preserved by Pliny and Mela. Q. Metellus Celer, when pro-consul of Cisalpine Gaul, in 62 B.C., received as a present from the king of the Suevi, some Indians, who were said to have sailed from India for purposes of trade, and to have been carried by contrary winds to Germany. The Suevi dwelt on the eastern bank of the Rhine; and their donation must have been sent to Metellus across the Alps.

The name of Britain seems to have been first made known to the Greeks by Pytheas, a Massilian navigator, who lived at or soon after the time of Alexander the Great. Pytheas published an account of a voyage which he declared himself to have made along the north-western coasts of Europe. He stated that he had visited Britain, and traversed the whole of it by land; he likewise gave an account of a marvellous island named Thule, situated six days' sail to the north of Britain, near the frozen sea; he did not profess to have reached this island; he stated, however, that it was composed of a substance which was neither earth, air, nor water, but was something compounded of all three, and resembled the pulmo marinus, a mollusca found in the Mediterranean. Of this substance, he asserted that he had seen a specimen. He likewise gave an account of amber being found in a northern island, opposite a shore of the ocean inhabited by the Guttones. He added that, on his return, he had sailed along the whole coast of northern Europe, between Gadeira and the Tanais.

The criticisms of Polybius and Strabo prove conclusively that Pytheas was to a great extent an impostor, and that the account of his voyage to these remote regions is entitled to little or no credit. The name and existence of Thule were equally the invention of Pytheas; they represented nothing real, although attempts were made in later times to invest Thule with a geographical character; and his statement that he had coasted along the north of Europe from the river Don to Cadiz, shows that his accounts rested not on fact, but on the fanciful errors received in his own day. It cannot be considered as certain that he even sailed as far as Britain. Gosselin, indeed, after a careful analysis of the supposed facts reported by Pytheas, comes to the conclusion that he never visited that island, but that he collected either at Gades, or at some other port frequented by the Carthaginians, some vague notions on the

northern seas and regions of Europe, and that he passed them off upon his countrymen for his own discoveries.*

Herodotus declares that he has no knowledge of the northern river Eridanus, or of the Cassiterid Islands, from which amber and tin were imported into Greece. He believes, nevertheless, that the two articles in question came from the extremities of the earth. These extremities of the earth were, doubtless, the southern shore of the Baltic and Cornwall; from which places the Greeks were supplied with these commodities, through the agency of some intermediate trade. Timæus, the historian, who wrote about 250 B.C., stated that tin was brought from an island within six days' sail of Britain; Polybius knew that tin was produced in the Britannic Islands; and Posidonius, about fifty years after him, stated that it was transported from those islands to Massilia. The most probable supposition is, that Greece and Italy were exclusively supplied with amber by an overland trade, across Central Europe, from the shores of the Baltic to the head of the Adriatic; and that the Britannic tin was for the most part carried across Gaul to Massilia.

Before about the year 700 B.C., the entire carrying trade of the Mediterranean seems to have been in the hands of the Tyrians; and they had, at periods antecedent to authentic history, established colonies at Carthage, Utica, and Gades. The northern coast of Africa was, to a great extent, Phoenician; the coasting voyage from the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules (which Scylax reckons at seventy-four days), could therefore be safely performed by a Tyrian merchant vessel. In this manner Tyre was able to carry on a regular trade with Gades and the wealthy. Tartessus, the favoured region upon the Bætis; but neither the Phoenicians nor the Carthaginians appear to have advanced their permanent settlements far to the west of Gades; and if their trade to the north did not extend further than their trade to the south, along the western shore of Africa, so far was it from reaching the amber coast of the Baltic, or the tin mines of Cornwall, that it could scarcely have ascended as high as the mouth of the Tagus. The traces of Phoenician establish

Recherches sur la Géographie des Anciens (Paris, 1813), vol. iv. p. 178. References to the numerous writings respecting Pytheas and his supposed discoveries will be found in Fuhr, De Pytheâ Massiliensi Dissertatio, Darmstadt, 1835; who likewise presents his readers with an engraving of the pulmo marinus. Bayle (Dict. art. Pytheas) says of him, 'Il abusa étrangement de la maxime, A beau mentir qui 'vient de loin; car il n'y eut sorte de fables qu'il ne racontât des 'pays septentrionaux, qu'il se vantoit d'avoir vus.'