lurking royal tiger. They had seen animals which, compared with
those of Europe, were not only strange, but colossal--the
rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the camel, the crocodiles of the
Nile and the Ganges. They had encountered men of many complexions
and many costumes: the swarthy Syrian, the olive-colored Persian.
the black African. Even of Alexander himself it is related that
on his death-bed he caused his admiral, Nearchus, to sit by his
side, and found consolation in listening to the adventures of
that sailor--the story of his voyage from the Indus up the
Persian Gulf. The conqueror had seen with astonishment the ebbing
and flowing of the tides. He had built ships for the exploration
of the Caspian, supposing that it and the Black Sea might be
gulfs of a great ocean, such as Nearchus had discovered the
Persian and Red Seas to be. He had formed a resolution that his
fleet should attempt the circumnavigation of Africa, and come
into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules--a feat
which, it was affirmed, had once been accomplished by the
Pharaohs.

INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF PERSIA. Not only her greatest soldiers,
but also her greatest philosophers, found in the conquered empire
much that might excite the admiration of Greece. Callisthenes
obtained in Babylon a series of Chaldean astronomical
observations ranging back through 1,903 years; these he sent to
Aristotle. Perhaps, since they were on burnt bricks, duplicates
of them may be recovered by modern research in the clay libraries
of the Assyrian kings. Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer,
possessed a Babylonian record of eclipses, going back 747 years
before our era. Long-continued and close observations were
necessary, before some of these astronomical results that have