[89] Chambers.
[90] Periplus of the Red Sea.
[91] Harmonies of Nature.
[92] He is supposed to have been poisoned at Akaba, where he died.
[93] See Month. Mag. No. 367.
[94] Wady signifies a valley; Wady Mousa is the valley of Moses.
[95] We may here give place to a few pertinent observations, in regard to the infancy and old age of nations, written by M. Claret Fleurien:—“If we are not disposed to challenge all the testimonies of antiquity, we cannot refuse to believe that the Old World has had its infancy and its adolescence: and, observing it in its progressive career, we may consider it as in its maturity, and foresee, in an unlimited time, its decrepitude and its end. The New World, like the Old, must have had its periods. America, at the epoch of its discovery, appears as if little remote from creation, from infancy, if we consider it in regard to the men by whom it was inhabited: the greater part of its people were still at the point where our ancestors and those of all the nations, at this day civilised, were four thousand years ago. Read what travellers and historians have related to us of the inhabitants of the New World; you will there find the man of the Old one in his infancy: among the small scattered nations, you will fancy that you see the first Egyptians; wild and savage men, living at random, ignorant of the conveniences of life, even of the use of fire, and not knowing how to form arms for defending themselves against the attack of beasts[a]: in the Pesserais of Tierra del Fuego, the savage Greeks, living on the leaves of trees, and, as it were, browsing on grass, before Pelasgus had taught the Arcadians to construct huts, to clothe themselves with the skin of animals, and to eat acorns[b]: in the greater part of the savages of Canada, the ancient Scythians, cutting off the hair of their vanquished enemies, and drinking their blood out of their skull[c]: in several of the nations of the north and south, the inhabitant of the East Indies, ignorant of culture, subsisting only on fruits, covered with skins of beasts, and killing the old men and the infirm, who could no longer follow in their excursions the rest of the family[d]: in Mexico, you will recognize the Cimbri and the Scythians, burying alive with the dead king the great officers of the crown[e]: in Peru as well as Mexico, and even among the small nations, you will find Druids, Vates, Eubages, mountebanks, cheating priests and credulous men[f]: on every part of the Continent and in the neighbouring islands, you will see the Bretons or Britons, the Picts of the Romans, and the Thracians, men and women, painting their body and face, puncturing and making incisions in their skin; and the latter condemning their women to till the ground, to carry heavy burdens, and imposing on them the most laborious employments[g]: in the forests of Canada, in the Brazils, and elsewhere, you will find Cantabri causing their enemies whom they have made prisoners of war to undergo torture, and singing the song of the dead round the stake where the victim is expiring in the most frightful torments[h]: in short, every where, America will present to you the horrible spectacle of those human sacrifices, with which the people of both worlds have polluted the whole surface of the globe; and several nations of the New World, like some of those of the Old[i], will make you shrink with horror at the sight of those execrable festivals, where man feeds with delight on the flesh of his fellow-creature. The picture which the New World exhibited to the men of the Old who discovered it, therefore, offered no feature of which our history does not furnish us with a model in the infancy of our political societies.”
[a] Diodor. Book I. Parag. 1. Art. 3.
[] Pausanias. Book VIII. Chap. 1.
[c] Herodot. Book IV.