6 Life of Sir Stamford Raffles — Introduction, 



Eastern and Western divisions of the Old World ; and from this 

 design the subjects we have touched upon were inseparable. 

 We now enter, however, upon a period in the history of the world, 

 in which .the votaries of science are directly interested ; — upon the 

 memorable era in which it was destined that the continents of the 

 Western Hemisphere on the one hand, and the navigation around 

 Africa to the Indian Ocean, on the other, should become known 

 to the inhabitants of Europe. 



As intimated in the foregoing paragraph, Europe, at the fall 

 of Constantinople, appears to have received from her Eastern 

 sister all the remaining advantages of a moral and intellectual 

 nature it was in her power to bestow. The direct communication 

 between them now ceased altogether, and was only renewed, after 

 the success of the voyages of discovery undertaken in the fifteenth 

 and following centuries. The pilgrimages to Jerusalem as well 

 as the Holy Wars, had imparted to the Religious, who were the 

 chief, if not the only followers of literary pursuits at this era, 

 some actual knowledge of Western Asia, with a few notices of 

 Arabia and Persia, gleaned from the traders to those countries. 

 But all that was known of India and the '^ further East," was 

 derived from the geographers and naturalists of classic antiquity. 

 Hence it is that in the first works on geography, published after 

 the invention of printing, and which of course had been the most 

 esteemed whilst in manuscript, (a sufficient interval not having 

 elapsed for their improvement from the discoveries in geography 

 that had just been made,) we find Strabo, Ctesias, Pliny, and 

 Solinus, with other writers of the same description, constantly 

 referred to as the only authorities on subjects relating to Eastern 

 Asia ; their statements being received and relied upon with im- 

 plicit confidence. The means of comparing these statements 

 with the actual condition and history of the countries described, 

 were now, however, to a certain extent, speedily obtained. 



The descendants of the Phoenician colonists on some of the 

 eastern coasts of the Atlantic, and the northern shores of the 

 Mediterranean, who had always retained a portion of the adven- 

 turous and enterprizing spirit of their ancient progenitors, began, 

 towards the latter part of the fifteenth century, to manifest that 



