[555] "The people of Babylon, the Accadians, had a
written literature and a civilization superior to that
of the conquering Assyrians, who borrowed their art of
writing, and probably their culture, which may have been
the centre and starting-point of the western
civilization of Asia, and therefore the origin of our
own. Accadian civilization was anterior to that of the
Phoenicians and the Greeks, and is now received in
these later years as the original form, and become again
the heritage of mankind. It has been said that Assyrian
art was destitute of originality, and to that of the
Accadians, which they adopted, we ourselves owe our
first customs and ideas. Four thousand years ago these
people possessed a culture which in many of its details
resembles that of our country and time."--"Assyrian Life
and History," p. 66, by M. Harkness and Stuart Poole.

[556] "The arts of spinning and the manufacture of linen
were introduced into Europe and drifted into Britain in
the Neolithic Age. They have been preserved with but
little variation from that period down to the present
day in certain remote parts of Europe, and have only
been superseded in modern times by the complicated
machinery so familiar to us.... The spindle and distaff
are proved by the perforated spindle-whorls, made of
stone, pottery, or bone, commonly met with in Neolithic
habitations or tombs. The thread is proved, by
discoveries in the Swiss lakes, to have been made of
flax; and the combs that have been found for pushing the
threads of the warp on the weft show that it was woven
into linen on some sort of loom."--Boyd Dawkins' "Early
Man in Britain," p. 275.

[557] I am aware that the presence of the Phoenicians
(or Carthaginians) on our coasts has been disputed; but
I think that the evidence of the Etruscan ornaments I
have mentioned gives more than probability to the truth
of Pliny's account of the expedition of Himilco from
Gades, 500 B.C. By some he is supposed to have been a
contemporary of Hanno, and of the third century B.C.
There is some confusion in the imperfect record of the
voyage; but it is difficult to interpret it otherwise
than that he touched at several points north of Gaul.
(See Boyd Dawkins' "Early Man in Britain," pp. 457-461;
see also Perrot and Chipiez, "L'Histoi