640 COSMOS. 



and the variations in terrestrial magnetism. Whilst the old 

 admiral strove to discover the spices of India, and the rhubarb 

 (ruibarba), which had already acquired a great celebrity 

 through the Arabian and Jewish physicians, and through the 

 account of Rubruquis and the Italian travellers, he also 

 examined with the greatest attention, the roots, fruits, and 

 leaves of the different plants. In drawing attention to 

 the influence exercised by this great age of nautical disco- 

 verers on the extension of natural views, we impart more 

 animation to our descriptions, by associating them with the 

 individuality of one great man. In the journal of his voyage, 

 and in his reports, which were first published from 1825 to 

 1829, we find almost all those circumstances touched upon, 

 to which scientific enterprise was directed in the latter half 

 of the fifteenth and throughout the whole of the sixteenth 

 centuries. 



We need only revert generally and cursorily to the exten- 

 sion imparted to the geography of western nations from the 

 period when the Infante Dom Henrique the navigator, at his 

 country-seat of Ter$a Naval, on the lovely Bay of Sagres, 

 sketched his first plan of discovery, to the expeditions of 

 Gaetano and Cabrillo to the South Sea. The daring expe- 

 ditions of the Portuguese, Spaniards, and English, evince the 

 suddenness with which a new sense, as it were, was opened 

 for the appreciation of the grand and the boundless. The 

 advance of nautical science and the application of astrono- 

 mical methods to the correction of the ship's reckoning, 

 favoured the efforts which gave to this age its peculiar cha- 

 racter, and revealed to men the image of the earth in all its 

 completeness of form. The discovery of the mainland of 

 tropical America (on the 1st of August, 1498,) occurred 

 seventeen months after Cabot reached the Labrador coast of 

 North America. Columbus did not see the terra firma of 

 South America on the mountainous shores of Paria, as has 

 generally been supposed, but at the Delta of the Orinoco, to 

 the east of Cano Macateo,* Sebastian Cabotf landed on the 



* See the results of my investigations, in the Relation hist, du Voyage 

 fiux, Regions equinoxiales du nouveau Continent, t. ii. p. 702 ; and in 

 the Examen crit. de I'Hist. de la Geographic, t. i. p. 309. 



t Biddle, Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, 1831, pp. 52-61; Examen 

 crit., t. iv. p. 231. 



