266 cosmos. 



which bathes the western shores of America, was the most 

 important cosmical event of the great epoch which we are 

 here describing. 



Ten years before Balboa, on the 25th of September, 1513, 

 first caught sight of the Pacific from the heights of the Sierra 

 de Quarequa at the Isthmus of Panama, Columbus distinctly 

 learned, when he was coasting along the eastern shores of Ve- 

 ragua, that to the west of this land there was a sea " which 

 in less than nine days' sail would bear ships to the Chersune- 

 sus aurea of Ptolemy and to the mouth of the Ganges." In 

 the same Carta rarissifna, which contains the beautiful and 

 poetic narration of a dream, the admiral says, that " the op- 

 posite coasts of Veragua, near the Rio de Belen, are situated 

 relatively to one another as Tortosa on the Mediterranean, 

 and Fuenterrabia in Biscay, or as Venice and Pisa." The 

 great ocean, the South Pacific, was even at that time regard- 

 ed as merely a continuation of the Sinus magnus (jueyac 

 k.6Xtto<;) of Ptolemy, situated before the golden Chersonesus, 

 while Cattigara and the land of the Sines (Thina?) were sup- 

 posed to constitute its eastern boundary. The fanciful hypoth- 

 esis of Hipparchus, according to which this eastern shore of 

 the great gulf was connected with the portion of the African 

 continent which extended far toward the east,* and thus sup- 

 posed to make a closed inland sea of the Indian Ocean, was 

 but little regarded in the Middle Ages, notwithstanding the 

 partiality to the views of Ptolemy a fortunate circumstance, 



in the expedition of the Commendador Garcia de Loaysa, which, follow 

 ing that of Magellan, was destined to proceed to the Moluccas. While 

 Loaysa was passing through the Straits of Magellan, Hoces, with his 

 caravel, the San Lesmes, was separated from the flotilla, and driven as 

 far as 55 south latitude. " Dijeron los del buque, que les parecia que 

 era alii acabamiento de tierra." (Navarrete, Viages de los Espanoles, 

 t. v., p. 28 and 404-488.) Fleurieu maintains that Hoces only saw the 

 Cabo del Buen Succeso, west of Staten Island. Toward the end of the 

 sixteenth century, such a strange uncertainty again prevailed respect- 

 ing the form of the land, that the author of the Araucana (canto i., oct. 

 9) believed that the Magellanic Straits had closed by an earthquake, 

 and by the upheaval of the bottom of the sea, while, on the other hand, 

 Acosta (Historia Natttral y Moral delas Indias, lib. iii.,cap. 10) regard- 

 ed the Terra del Fuego as the beginning of a great south polar land. 

 (Compare, also, ante, p. 72.) 



* Whether the isthmus hypothesis, according to which Cape Prasum, 

 on the eastern shore of Africa, was connected with the eastern Asiatic 

 isthmus of Thinse, is to be traced to Marinusof Tyre, or to Hipparchus. 

 or to the Babylonian Seleucus, or rather to Aristotle, De Cmlo (ii., 14), 

 is a question treated in detail in another work, Examen Crit., t. i., p. 

 144, 161, and 329; t. ii., p. 370-372. 



