LECTURES. 105 



more. Whether and how America was connected with Asia and 

 Taitary, continued to he hmg disfuited, until at hist^ scarcely one 

 hundred years ago, the Russians pointed out the strait that bears the 

 name of one of their renowned explorers, and the united efforts of 

 Spanish, English, and Russian navigators brought everything into 

 its right place. 



Scarcely less slow was the progress of light in the southern region. 

 For more than a century after Columbus, the southern island, called 

 "the Land of Fire," was pictured as a part of a great imaginary 

 southern continent, which covered and barricaded the ocean from Ma- 

 gellan's Strait to the Antarctic pole. This southern continent is repre- 

 sented on our ancient maps as nearly of the size of Asia. ISIew Holland, 

 New Zealand, and other islands are all made a part of it. It receives 

 at different times very different dimensions, and alternately contracts 

 and expands, like the cloud which Hamlet showed to Polonius, and 

 which, according to the disposition of the beholder, took the shape of 

 a camel, of an elephant, or of a bird. Some said this continent was 

 peopled by above 25 millions of souls, and the map designers embel- 

 lished it with cities and castles, with forests and animals of different 

 kinds. Into this cloud dived at last, in the beginning and middle of 

 the 17th century, the Dutch and British navigators,, and made it dis- 

 appear from the geographical horizon by rounding the stormy cape. 



In like manner, Newfoundland and other islands were successively 

 detached from the continent. The Gulf of St. Lawrence and other 

 large Mediterranean bays were roughly traced out. Still the image of 

 America was as yet nothing but an outline. The whole vast interior 

 remained a blank, or at least was more filled with products of the 

 imagination than with portraits after nature. The movements of 

 navigators were by their nature quicker than those of land travellers. 

 And not only so, but the latter continued for a long time to be less 

 scientific, and were less provided with appliances and instruments for 

 astronomical and other observations. 



Consequently, our old charts of America are generally better than 

 our maps, on which the rivers with their innumerable branches are 

 endlessly perplexed; while mountains and plains show sucli anoma- 

 lous and varying configurations, that the whole continent at first 

 sight appears like a huge kaleidoscope, the materials contained in 

 which were constantly subjected to new and fantastic transformations. 



Still, there is a method even in their madness ! For, if we 

 look a little closer at these ftmciful delineations, we may sometimes 

 discover that, erroneous though they may be, still they are not down- 

 right falsehoods. There are few which are not founded upon some- 

 thing, upon an old tradition, upon a favorite notion of the time, upon 

 a geographical hypothesis, or at the least upon reports of the wild 

 Indiana, which, it is true, were sometimes misunderstood. We could 

 exhibit, for instance, maps of this time, on which the great river of 

 St. Lawrence is represented as much larger than it really is — as occu- 

 pying the whole locality of the upper Mississippi and Missouri, and 

 running through the entire broad continent of America. Yet looking 

 with due discrimination at the circumstances, we perceive that, 

 according to the state of information at the time, the old map 



