292 ISLANDS DISCOVERED 



voyage of discovery; but it might perhaps be as 

 important, and for the geography of the South Sea 

 indisputably more interesting, to solve the doubts 

 which still exist respecting some former discoveries 

 which have never since been recognised, and thus 

 to regulate the geography of the Great Ocean, than 

 to discover here and there a new island. The vanity 

 of the nation to which the navigator belongs might 

 perhaps be more flattered by the discovery of some 

 new islands, than by finding again some more an- 

 cient discoveries ; the gain for science is however 

 less, especially if the position of the newly-dis- 

 covered islands is not determined with astronomical 

 precision. 



Among the problems still to be solved in the great 

 ocean, the islands discovered by the Dutch in the 

 seventeenth, and in the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, are those which have chiefly occupied the 

 attention of geographers. Dalrymple and Burney 

 in England, and Fleurieu in France, have ex- 

 pressed very different opinions on their probable 

 existence ; particularly Fleurieu, who has written a 

 very elaborate treatise in the third volume of his 

 excellent edition of Marchant's Voyage, on the 

 discoveries of Admiral Roggewein ; and many 

 geographers have been induced, by the well-known 

 talents of this learned navigator, to adopt his 

 opinions as the most correct. It has, therefore, 

 long been the wish of geographers, that the regions 

 in which the discoveries of Le Maire, Schouten, 

 and Roggewein lie, should be examined : a task 



