rs that are blown by the
north-east wind from the Sabaean coast:----Many a league, Pleased with
the grateful scent, old Ocean smiles. (Plin. Hist. Natur. xii. 42.)]

[Footnote 7: Agatharcides affirms, that lumps of pure gold were found,
from the size of an olive to that of a nut; that iron was twice, and
silver ten times, the value of gold, (de Mari Rubro, p. 60.) These real
or imaginary treasures are vanished; and no gold mines are at present
known in Arabia, (Niebuhr, Description, p. 124.) * Note: A brilliant
passage in the geographical poem of Dionysius Periegetes embodies the
notions of the ancients on the wealth and fertility of Yemen. Greek
mythology, and the traditions of the "gorgeous east," of India as well
as Arabia, are mingled together in indiscriminate splendor. Compare on
the southern coast of Arabia, the recent travels of Lieut. Wellsted--M.]

[Footnote 8: Consult, peruse, and study the Specimen Hostoriae Arabum of
Pocock, (Oxon. 1650, in 4to.) The thirty pages of text and version are
extracted from the Dynasties of Gregory Abulpharagius, which Pocock
afterwards translated, (Oxon. 1663, in 4to.;) the three hundred and
fifty-eight notes form a classic and original work on the Arabian
antiquities.]

The measure of population is regulated by the means of subsistence;
and the inhabitants of this vast peninsula might be outnumbered by the
subjects of a fertile and industrious province. Along the shores of the
Persian Gulf, of the ocean, and even of the Red Sea, the Icthyophagi,
[9] or fish eaters, continued to wander in quest of their precarious
food. In this primitive and abject state, which ill deserves the name of
society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or
language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
Generations and ages might roll away in silent oblivion, and the
helpless savage was restrained from multiplying his race by the wants
and pursuits which confined his existence to the narrow margin of the
seacoast. But in an early period of antiquity the great body of the
Arabs had emerged from this scene of misery; and as the naked wilderness
could not maintain a people of hunters, they rose at once to the more
secure and plentiful condition of the pastoral life. The same life
is uniformly pursued by the roving tribes of the desert; and in the
portrait of the modern Bedoweens, we may trace the features of their
ancestors, [10] who, in the age of Moses o