[Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year eighteen hundred and ninety, by WILLIAM J. WHITE, at the Department of Agriculture.]

PRINTED BY THE GAZETTE PRINTING COMPANY, AT THEIR PRINTING HOUSE, CORNER

CRAIG AND ST. FRANCOIS XAVIER STREETS, MONTREAL.

It was in Egypt that provision was first made for a regular and constant supply of interpreters. According to Herodotus (II. 164) they constituted the sixth class into which the community was divided-priests, warriors, cowherds, swineherds, and tradesmen coming before them, and pilots following. Plato mentions but six, Diodorus, but five classes, both omitting that of interpreters. That they existed, nevertheless, there seems no reason to doubt, as Diodorus gives an account of their first establishment, which is virtually identical with that of Herodotus. The story runs that Psammitichus, having overcome his rivals by the aid of certain Ionian and Carian mercenaries, granted them lands, near the city of Bubastis, on the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and put Egyptian children under their care to be instructed in the Greek language, and it was from them that the interpreters of Egypt were descended.

A man who had dealings with the same nation of Asiatic Greeks was Gyges, King of Lydia, the Gog of the Old Testament, the Gugu, of the Assyrian inscrip

tions. Towards the middle of his reign, his dominions were overrun by the Kimmerians, the Gomer of the Bible, the Gemirrai of Assyrian epigraphy and the Asiatic kinsmen of our western Kymry. They pushed him so hard that he was driven to sue for help to the potent Assur-bani-pal, to whom he even consented to become tributary, if Lydia were only rid of its harassing foes. But an awkward obstacle intervened between the planning and consummation of the embassy. There were no interpreters, and it was only after considerable delay that a person could be found to act as intelligible spokesman for the Lydian envoys. When it was announced at the capital that men in uncouth attire and of strange speech had appeared on the Assyrian frontier, they were ordered to be brought before the great king. They bent low in the attitude of suppliants, but what they said none of Assur-bani-pal's courtiers understood. Then the king ordered a parade of all the foreigners in his realm, if haply there might be found any who could translate the words of the new-comers. At last a man appeared who knew enough of Lydian speech to inform His Majesty that Gyges begged his assistance. Soon after came a second embassy with rich presents and two of the refrac tory Kymry bound in fetters. But Gyges, freed from the terror of his foes, forgot his vows of submission and sided with Psammitichus in his war against Assur-bani-pal. His treachery gained him little, for the Kimmerians broke out again, and he had to fight not only unaided, but with the moral force of the Assyrian king on the side of the aggressors. He fell in battle, but his son Ardys drove out the Kymry and again made friends with Assur-banipal. Out of that succession of troubles arose the movement of the Greeks to Egypt and the institution there of the class of interpreters, already referred to. For it was through the influence of Gyges that the Ionian and Carian troops, who settled afterwards at Bubastis, were sent to King Psammitichus.