regions of West Africa, we have no means of judging, but it is on the whole probable that they did. The voyage of Hanno, the Carthaginian admiral, along the western side of Africa can hardly have failed to make known to them the existence of rich gold fields, even if they had been previously ignorant of them; but it is still more likely that it was the knowledge of such an Eldorado far away beyond the great Sahara that induced them to send out the expedition.
It has often happened in the history of both ancient and modern commerce that the products of a certain region are known long before travellers or merchants from civilized lands have ever reached the country that produces them. Thus the merchants of Marseilles were probably familiar with the tin brought from Devon and Cornwall across Gaul before the famous Pytheas ever coasted round Spain and Gaul and visited our shores. Again, in modern times, it is only within the last thirty years that the source of that most familiar of drugs, Turkey rhubarb, has been discovered.
By whatever means they may have learned its existence the following passage of Herodotus (IV. 196) puts it beyond all doubt that the Carthaginians in the fifth century B.C. traded by sea for gold to the west coast of Africa, and that consequently the savages of that region must have been long acquainted with the metal: "The Carthaginians," he says, "also relate the following: there is a country in Libya and a nation beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which they are wont to visit, where they no sooner arrive than forthwith they unlade their wares, and having disposed them after an orderly fashion along the beach, leave them and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke. The natives, when they see the smoke, come down to the shore, and laying out to view so much gold as they think the worth of the wares, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore and look; if they think the gold enough, they take it and go their way, but if it does not seem to them sufficient, they go aboard once more and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are content. Neither party deals unfairly with the other, for they themselves never touch the gold until
