OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 217 



all chose passages of Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca, on the prox- 

 imity of Eastern Asia to the Pillars of Hercules, which, as his 

 eon Fernando says, were the means of inciting him to discover 

 the Indian lands {autoridad de los escritores i^ara mover al 

 Almirante d descuhrir las Indias), were gathered by the ad- 

 miral from the writings of the cardinal. He must have car- 

 ried these works with him on his voyages ; for, in a letter 

 which he addressed to the Spanish monarchs from the island 

 of Haiti, in the month of October, 1498, he translated word 

 for word a passage from Alliacus's treatise, De Qua7ititate 

 TerrcB habitabilis, which appears to have made a deep im- 

 pression on his mind. Columbus probably did not know that 

 AUiacus had also transcribed verbatim, from an earlier work, 

 the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon.* Singular age, when the 

 combined testimony of Aristotle and Averroes (Avenryz), of 

 Esdras and of Seneca, regarding the small extent of the ocean 

 in comnarison with continental masses, could serve to convince 

 monarchs of the expediency of a costly enterprise ! 



I have already drawn attention to the marked predilection 

 manifested at the close of the thirteenth century for the study 

 of natural forces, and the progressive and philosophical direc- 

 tion assumed by this study in its scientific establishment on 

 the basis of experiment. It still remains briefly to consider 

 the influence exercised by the revival of classical literature, at 

 the close of the fourteenth century, on the deepest sources of 

 the mental life of nations, and, therefore, on the general con- 

 templation of the universe. The individuality of certain 

 highly-gifted men had contributed to increase the rich mass of 

 facts possessed by the world of ideas. The susceptibility of a 

 freer intellectual development already existed when Greek 

 literature, driven from its ancient seats, acquired a firm footing 

 in Western lands, under the favoring action of apparently ac- 

 cidental relations. 



The Arabs, in their classical studies, had remained strangers 

 to all that appertains to the inspiration of language, their 

 studies being limited to a very small number of the writers 

 of antiquity, and, in accordance with their strong national pred- 

 ilection for natural investigation, principally to the physical 

 books of Aristotle, to the Almagest of Ptolemy, the botanical 



Helico. These essays remind us of some very recent ones on the Mo 

 saic Geology, published four hundred years after the cardhial's." 



* Compare Columbus's letter, Navarrete, Viages y D escuhrimientot 

 i. i. , p. 244, with the Imago Mundi of Cardinal d'Ailly, cap. 8, anH 

 Roger Bacon's Opus Majus, p iS3. 



