CHARACTER OP COLUMBUS. 395 



bus, upon his own reason and knowledge. But he would 

 penetrate more thoroughly these regions of mystery, though 

 guided only by the dirn lights of the science of his age. 

 This must be, he continued, an extension of the Asiatic 

 continent. Of course, the greater part of the globe is 

 firm land : and in this conclusion he found himself sup- 

 ported by Aristotle, Seneca, and various saints and car- 

 dinals not to lay stress upon the apocryphal assertion 

 of Esdras, that of seven parts of the earth six are dry 

 land. Here, then, was a beautiful and fertile country, 

 wide-spread under the most benignant skies, rich with 

 the ' jewels of the mine,' free to be explored, appropri- 

 ated, and above all christianized, by any nation capable 

 of doing it. Columbus was boine away by the fervor 

 of his hopes. ' May it pleasure our Lord,' he writes to 

 his sovereigns, to give long life and health to your high- 

 nesses, that you may prosecute this so noble enterprise, 

 in which, melhinks, God will receive great service, Spain 

 vast increase of grandeur, and all Christians much con- 

 solation and delight, since the name of our Saviour will 

 be divulged throughout these lands.' 



His reveries go far beyond this. He collected an as- 

 tonishing variety of phenomena, going to support, as he 

 thought, a new theory of the earth, according to which, 

 instead of being spherical, it was pear-shaped. The 

 protuberant and tapering part he located in the interior 

 of his new continent, and upon the edge of this swelling 

 of the earth he had already arrived. Hence, certain 

 variations of the needle were singularly accounted for. 

 Hence the climate of great heat and unwholesome air 

 he had met with, arising, as he had told Peter Martyr, 

 from his ' having ascended the back of the sea, as it 

 were ascending a high mountain towards heaven.' And 

 so, too, the altitude of the north star increased, and the 

 circle it described appeared larger. And thus he ex- 

 plained the great superiority of the country, the air, and 

 the people, in freshness and beauty, over others in the 

 same latitude such as those of Africa. He looked up 

 confirmations of this opinion, as usual, in the ancient 

 writers. And as to holy writ, he observed, that ' the 

 sun, when God made it, was in the centre of the orient, or 

 the first light was there ;' and that place could only be 



