THE HUMAN SPECIES. 235 



their institutions, and then the consequence is natural. 

 We see the proofs of it in the Turkish imitations of the 

 Byzantines, and in the Mongolic of the Chinese. 



The foot of Man has pressed many a soil which later 

 travellers assume was never trodden before them. 

 Navigating antiquity knew many geographical facts 

 that scholastic prejudice neglected for the sake of gram- 

 matical pursuits. From King Alfred's writings we know 

 the voyage of Othere towards the North Pole; and 

 that even from England, navigators visited distant seas 

 in the ninth century. Dicuil's incidental notice of 

 Iceland, in the beginning of the same age, was not ob- 

 served till of late years. The Scandinavian discovery 

 of Greenland was long doubted ; though it is now proved 

 that these hardy seamen pushed their discovery along 

 the coasts of America, beyond the equator, to Brazil. 

 We have discredited, with equal resoluteness, the dis- 

 covery of Newfoundland by the brothers Zeni, Vene- 

 tian navigators, seventy years before the voyage of 

 Columbus, according to Cardinal Zurla. Documents 

 published at Copenhagen, prove the same coast to have 

 been repeatedly visited by the Northmen from the years 

 980 and 1000 to 1380 ; and the Biscayen whalers seem 

 to have equally known this region by an accidental 

 south-easterly storm, which drove them from their fish- 

 ing station off the Irish shores, in the reign of King 

 Henry VI., that is, about 1450 ; and all this incredu- 

 lity and apathy, when the names of Brazil, of Antillia, 

 and the country known as Newfoundland, were already 

 noted, though not correctly laid down in the chart of 



