it any great advantage. But after a very short trial, we
found they made such progress, that we saw our labour was like to be
more successful than we could have expected. They learned to write
their characters, and to pronounce their language so exactly, had so
quick an apprehension, they remembered it so faithfully, and became so
ready and correct in the use of it, that it would have looked like a
miracle if the greater part of those whom we taught had not been men
both of extraordinary capacity and of a fit age for instruction. They
were for the greatest part chosen from among their learned men, by their
chief council, though some studied it of their own accord. In three
years' time they became masters of the whole language, so that they read
the best of the Greek authors very exactly. I am indeed apt to think
that they learned that language the more easily, from its having some
relation to their own. I believe that they were a colony of the Greeks;
for though their language comes nearer the Persian, yet they retain many
names, both for their towns and magistrates, that are of Greek
derivation. I happened to carry a great many books with me, instead of
merchandise, when I sailed my fourth voyage; for I was so far from
thinking of soon coming back, that I rather thought never to have
returned at all, and I gave them all my books, among which were many of
Plato's and some of Aristotle's works. I had also Theophrastus on
Plants, which, to my great regret, was imperfect; for having laid it
carelessly by, while we were at sea, a monkey had seized upon it, and in
many places torn out the leaves. They have no books of grammar but
Lascares, for I did not carry Theodorus with me; nor have they any
dictionaries but Hesichius and Dioscorides. They esteem Plutarch highly,
and were much taken with Lucian's wit, and with his pleasant way of
writing. As for the poets, they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and
Sophocles of Aldus's edition; and for historians Thucydides, Herodotus
and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry
with him some of Hippocrates's works, and Galen's Microtechne, which
they hold in great estimation; for though there is no nation in the
world that needs physic so little as they do, yet there is not any that
honours it so much: they reckon the knowledge of it one of the
pleasantest and most profitable parts of philosophy, by which, as they
search into the secrets of Nature, so they n