llie Naming of America. 207 



^' "West Indies ; " witness Las Indias, the Spanish official name 

 including even now all our continent ; witness the words, 

 "King of the Indies," Indiarum rex, stamped on every Spanish 

 dollar we, ever saw. 



Show Agassiz one bone, and he would reconstruct any ani- 

 mal ; so when Columbus beheld one corner of trans-Gangetic 

 India, that is of Eastern Asia, he could map the whole of it, 

 for that eastern coast line was known to him from the relations 

 of overland travelers. The configuration of that Asiatic line 

 is not without resemblances to that of eastern North America. 

 Hence the delusion lasted longer, and each new finding pieced 

 out the Asiatic map, like a new patch sewed on an old gar- 

 ment. A quarter of a century after the death of Columbus, 

 the prince of German geographers still maintained that Mexico 

 conquered by Cortez ten years before, was the Chinese city 

 Quinsay, so excessively extolled by Marco Polo. So Hum- 

 boldt tells us in his Cosmos, 



Syllacius, the first Italian who described the first voyage of 

 Columbus, in his '' opusculum de insulis nuper repertis^^ assured 

 both that that navigator had pushed through to trans-Gangetio 

 India, and perhaps also satisfied that a ship sailing westward 

 must slip off from the world, represents Columbus as circum- 

 navigating Africa. Ultra JEquatoris metas, usque ad Arabiae 

 heatas insulas. Persistence in mistaking North America for 

 Asia was one among countless illustrations that false knowl- 

 edge is worse than ignorance ; a truth so well understood by 

 Isocrates, who always exacted double fees from siudents who 

 came from another teacher, one for unteaching as well as one 

 for teaching. 



Among the results of Columbus's error, the Pacific was 

 called the /South Sea, being supposed to lie almost altogether 

 south of the equator, and the better half of the western hemi- 

 sphere was reckoned by many an appendix of Asia, even un- 

 til Behring passed through his Straits only four years before 

 (the birth of George Washington. 



