written to his scholars or cotemporaries; or whether all that learned of him did it not by the ear and memory; and all that remained of him, for some succeeding ages, were not by tradition. But whether these ever writ or no, they were the fountains out of which the following Greek philosophers drew all those streams that have since watered the studies of the learned world, and furnished the voluminous writings of so many sects as passed afterwards under the common name of philosophers.
As there were guides to those that we call ancients, so there were others that were guides to them, in whose search they travelled far and laboured long.
There is nothing more agreed than that all the learning of the Greeks was deduced originally from Egypt or Phœnicia; but whether theirs might not have flourished to that degree it did by the commerce of the Æthiopians, Chaldeans, Arabians, and Indians, is not so evident (though I am very apt to believe it), and to most of these regions some of the Grecians travelled in search of those golden mines of learning and knowledge: not to mention the voyages of Orpheus, Musaeus, Lycurgus, Thales, Solon, Democritus,
