intending to penetrate the African continent in the direction of the newly discovered Lake Ngami, but her funds failing her, she was obliged to content herself with a few rambles and the execution of her second project, the exploration of the Sunda Islands. Accordingly, in the beginning of 1852, she reached Sarawak, and from thence passed into the interior of Borneo. She afterwards visited Jara and Sumatra, going fearlessly into the midst of the cannibal Batacks, whom Europeans had hitherto avoided, and who considered her a kind of superhuman being. From the Molaccas she went to California, having had a fVee passage offered her to that "execrable gold land," as she terms it. From thence she passed down the western coast of America; then she visited the source of the Amazon, crossed the Andes, and then traversed the length and breadth of North America, and looked upon its most grand and beautiful lake, forest, and mountain scenery. Towards the close of 1854 we again find this extraordinary woman in London. Her account of this journey was subsequently published, and perhaps exceeds in interest and novelty any of her other books.
Madame Pfeiffer is meditating, we understand, if she has not already set out on, another journey. When we reflect on the vast amount of fatigue she has undergone, on the extent of ground over which she has travelled, on the imminent peril to which she has on many occasions exposed herself, we are struck with astonishment. She is by no means a bold masculine-looking woman, as one would suppose, but is in "her every-day life plainer, quieter, and more reserved than thousands of her own sex who have never left the seclusion of their native village."
Her books, all of which have been published in England, are pleasantly written; she has great graphic power of description, and a considerable amount of scientific knowledge, which enabled her to make correct geographical observations, and describe correctly the animals and plants that she meets with
PHÆDYMA,
Daughter of Olanes, one of the seven Persian lords who conspired against Smerdis the Magian. Being married to Smerdis, who pretended to be the son of Cyrus the Great, she discovered his imposture to her father, by his want of ears, which Cambyses had cut off. She lived B.C. 621.
PHANTASIA,
Daughter of Nicanchus of Memphis, in Egypt. Chiron, a celebrated personage of antiquity, asserted that Phantasia wrote a poem on the Trojan war, and another on the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, from which Homer copied the greater part of the Iliad and Odyssey, when he visited Memphis, where these poems were deposited. She lived in the twelfth century before Christ.
PHEBE,
A deaconess of the port of Corinth called Cenchrea. St. Paul had a particular esteem for her, and Theodoret thinks he lodged at her house while at Corinth. She brought to Rome the epistle he wrote to the Romans, wherein she is so highly commended.
In this epistle, the apostle names, with warm approval, the faith and works of a number of women who appear to have been devoted,
