GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA 209
When I took the chair the next day, the zeal of Mr. W. was conspicuous in the diagrams he had hung round the walls like a frieze. Each diagram contained a representation of one of the 35 or so characters. Below it was its Hebrew equivalent, and below all was a free translation, in which I noted there were more words than there were, letters in the original, and my misgivings grew. The paper proved to be long and tedious, as papers on antiquarian subjects often are, and the audience melted away. At length the reporters could stand it no longer, and most fortunately left also. The audience was then reduced to a mere handful of persons, and when the paper was finished Mr. C. rose, who was a recognised authority on Greek manuscripts, and said that he had no pretensions in respect to a knowledge of Phenician, but as a mere question of resemblance it struck him that the characters (which he pointed out) seemed to him less like the alleged Hebrew equivalents than to the letters forming the Greek word ALEXANDROS. There was no doubt he was right, and the small audience tittered. In the meantime the Secretary, a well-known antiquarian, became more and more excited, and jumped up as soon as Mr. C. had sat down, and exclaimed, " Phenician I " (Contemptuous grunt.) "Greek!" (Another different and equally contemptuous grunt.) " Can you not read
H I C J AC E T ' ? " and I must say his reading seemed to me the least forced of the three. I think all of us felt utterly ashamed. Had the reporters been present, the fun that could have been made by the newspapers out of the incident would have been a disaster to the credit of the Association, The Reports of that
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