VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN. oQ 



there will be abundant reason to subscribe to Captain 

 Cook's observation with regard to New Zealand, 

 which may be applied to other tracks of land explored 

 by him, that " although they be far remote from the 

 " present trading world, we can, by no means, tell 

 " what use future ages may make of the discoveries 

 "made by the present."* In this point of view, 

 surely, the utility of the late voyages must stand 

 confessed ; and we may be permitted to say, that the 

 history of their operations, which will be completed 

 in these volumes, has the justest pretensions to be 

 called xT%,a he as), as it will convey to latest posterity 

 a treasure of interesting information. 



3. Admitting, however, that we may have ex- 

 pressed too sanguine expectations of commercial ad- 

 vantages, either within our own reach, or gradually 

 to be unfolded at some future period, as the result of 

 our voyages of discovery, we may still be allowed to 

 consider them as a laudable effort to add to the stock 

 of human knowledge, with regard to an object which 

 cannot but deserve the attention of enlightened man. 

 To exert our faculties in devising ingenious modes 

 of satisfying ourselves about the magnitude and 

 distance of the sun; to extend our acquaintance with 

 the system to which that luminary is the common 

 centre, by tracing the revolutions of a new planet, 

 or the appearance of a new comet ; to carry our bold 

 researches through all the immensity of space, where 

 world beyond world rises to the view of the aston- 

 ished observer ; these are employments which none 

 but those incapable of pursuing them can depreciate, 

 and which every one capable of pursuing them must 

 delight in, as a dignified exercise of the powers of 

 the human mind. But while we direct our studies 

 " to distant worlds, which, after all our exertions, we 

 must content ourselves with having barely discovered 

 to exist, it would be a strange neglect, indeed, and 



Sec VoL III. p. 107. 



