SCYTHIA. 93

have worn moccasins. These may have suggested the Satyrs of the Greeks. A common superstition also placed a wonderfully good and happy people behind the region of the north wind, called Hyperboreans. So the " blameless " Ethiopians were supposed to inhabit the extreme South. The Greeks believed in goodness when a very long way from home. Our author mentions slightly, and with some dis- dain, the legend (known also to other writers) of one of these Hyperboreans, Abaris, who was said to have been even a greater traveller than himself who "walked round the world with an arrow, without once eating." But whatever may be thought of the latter part of the story, it seems highly probable that in Abaris's " arrow " we have a dim tradition of the magnetic needle. Its properties were certainly known to the Chinese long before Herodotus's date, and some rumour of the marvel might have reached Europe. The story tempts Herodotus into speculative cosmo- graphy. He is dissatisfied with the map of Hecataeus, who divided the habitable world into two equal por- tions, Europe and Asia, making it like a medal, with the great river of Ocean for a rim ; not that he himself at all suspected the world of being a sphere, like some of the later ancients, but that he thought the distribu- tion of the continents manifestly unsound. If Herodotus had been in the habit of rejecting every tale that he did not believe, like some later writers, we should have lost the valuable passage which seems to prove that Africa was circumnavigated twenty-one centuries before the time of Diaz and Yasco de Gama. Pharaoh Necbo, after giving up the Suez canal as hopeless, sent a fleet of Phoenician ships down