Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/580

564 more than human: it is probable this bow would have broke, rather than have bent.

the situation of these Macrobii in Ptolemy did not put it past dispute that they were Shangalla, we should hesitate much at the characteristic of the nation; that they were long livers; none of these nations are so; I scarcely remember an example fairly vouched of a man past sixty. But there is one circumstance that I think might have fairly led Herodotus into this mistake; some of the Shangalla kill their sick, weak, and aged people; there are others that honour old age, and protect it. The Macrobii, I suppose, were of this last kind, who certainly, therefore, had many old men, more than the others.

now just mention one other observation tending to illustrate a passage of ancient history.

, in his Periplus, remarks, that, while sailing along the coast of Africa, close by the shore, and probably, near the low country called Kolla, inhabited by the kind of people we have been just describing, he found an universal silence to prevail the whole day, without any appearance of man or beast: on the contrary, at night, he saw a number of fires, and heard the sound of music and dancing. This has been laughed at as a fairy tale by people who affect to treat Hanno's fragment as spurious; for my own part, I will not enter into the controversy.

great genius, (in some matters, perhaps, the greatest that ever wrote, and in every thing that he writes highly respectable) M. de Montesqieu, is perfectly satisfied that