252 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the past eleven years, his residence and work in the various universities, 

 his intimate association with the learned professors he had met, espe- 

 cially the four named above, had tremendously stimulated him. He 

 had received the best that Europe had to give, but he was not content. 

 Manget says that he constantly had before him the saying of his father 

 and grandfather that the world lay open before him. 



While in Leyden he received another great and even more powerful 

 stimulus, one which was to determine his whole future life. Amster- 

 dam, twenty-two miles away, was the headquarters of the Dutch West 

 India Company. This company had been formed, not, like its great 

 confrere of the East Indies, for trade and colonization, but primarily to 

 harry the New World trade and settlements of the Spaniards and Por- 

 tuguese, the ultimate objects being to capture treasure ships and to 

 create a diversion in favor of the Belgians, with whom the Spaniards 

 were at war. In the course of events, however, the Dutch had captured 

 and at that time held the whole of the northeast coast of Brazil. 



Marcgrave knew many Dutchmen who had returned from Brazil, 

 and their stories of the new world fired his imagination and tremen- 

 dously stirred his ambition. He seems to have made up his mind to 

 go to Brazil, not as a mere adventurer, but as a student and scientist. 

 Manget tells us that 



He burned with great desire to study the southern stars, Mercury especially, 

 and he saw the great (unworked) field of natural history and the harvest of no 

 small praise to be gained (from it) in America. Therefore he moved every stone 

 and sought every opportunity for going to America. 



Living in Amsterdam at this time was Jan de Laet, " Prefect " or 

 managing director of the Dutch West India Company. Marcgrave 

 knew De Laet and sought his influence and help, and so successfully 

 that he was appointed astronomer to the company was so enrolled on its 

 archives, and was assigned in that capacity for investigation in Brazil. 



Accordingly, Marcgrave left Holland, which he was destined never 

 again to see, on January 1, 1638, and after a voyage of two months 

 reached the coast of Brazil. This expedition was under the leadership 

 of Johann Moritz, Count of Nassau- Siegen, to whom was entrusted the 

 supreme command of the Dutch conquests in the New World, and who 

 had preceded Marcgrave into Brazil by a little more than a year. This 

 remarkable man was not merely a great soldier and statesman, but was 

 a lover and cultivator of the sciences in which he was no mean student. 4 



4 With regard to Count Maurice, the present writer can not do better than 

 quote Swainson's encomium which is attested by all the other writers who speak 

 of the Count, "It is almost inconceivable how this illustrious man, whose life, at 

 this period, would appear to have been spent alternately in the camp and the 

 council, could find leisure even to think of science, still less to have prosecuted 

 it in his closet. Yet the versatility of his mind, and its power of abstraction, 

 was so great that such was actually the fact. He not only patronized and assisted 



