MONKEYS. 27

expedition, and this voyage, though not considered impos-
sible, involves many and serious difficulties, Herodotus
describes such a voyage as having been for the first time
undertaken by the Phoenicians, under the orders of Pharaoh
Necho, king of Egypt, four hundred years after the time of
Solomon, and these people would surely have known from
their public records (in which circumstances of much less
importance are noted) that the voyage had been frequently
made by their ancestors.

The matter being involved in so much uncertainty, we
shall give the reader the advantage of the deductions made
by the authors of the notes to the ‘ Pictorial Bible,’ in which
a full and interesting account of the various opinions on this
intricate point may be found.

“The reader will by this time begin, perhaps, to question
whether any particular places are denoted by the words Tar-
shish and Ophir. We have already explained that ‘ships
of Tarshish’ were probably so called from being like those
which went from Phoenicia to the Atlantic, especially
adapted to a long voyage. Now, by an obvious transition
of ideas among a people whose notions of distant places
were very indefinite, when ships that made long voyages
were called ships of Tarshish, the name may, in process of