648 COSMOS. 



ascertain its fate*'. California was already, in 1 541 , recognised 

 to be an arid, woodless peninsula, a fact that was forgot- 

 ten in the seventeenth century. We moreover gather from 

 the narratives of Balboa, Pedrarias Davila, and Hernan Cortez, 

 that hopes were entertained at that period, of finding in the 

 Pacific, then considered to be a portion of the Indian Ocean, 

 groups of islands, rich in spices, gold, precious stones, and 

 pearls. Excited fancy urged men to undertake great enter- 

 prises, and the daring of these undertakings, whether suc- 

 cessful or not, reacted on the imagination, and excited it still 

 more powerfully. Thus, notwithstanding the thorough "ab- 

 sence of political freedom, many circumstances concurred at 

 this remarkable age of the Conquista, a period of over- 

 wrought excitement, violence, and of a mania for discove- 

 ries by sea and land, to favour individuality of character, 

 and to enable some highly- gifted minds to develope many 

 noble germs drawn from the depths of feeling. They err 

 who believe that the Conquistadores were incited by love 

 of gold and religious fanaticism alone. Perils always exalt 

 the poetry of life ; and, moreover, the remarkable age whose 

 influence on the development of cosmical ideas we are now 

 depicting, gave to all enterprises, and to the natural impres- 

 sions awakened by distant travels, the charm of novelty and 

 surprise, which is beginning to fail us in the present well- 

 instructed age, when so many portions of the earth are 

 opened to us. Not only one hemisphere, but almost two- 

 thirds of the earth, were then a new and unexplored world, 

 as unseen as that portion of the moon's surface which the law 

 of gravitation constantly averts from the glance of the inha- 

 bitants of the earth. Our deeply-inquiring age finds in the 

 increasing abundance of ideas presented to the human mind a 

 compensation for the surprise formerly induced by the novelty 

 of grand, massive, and imposing natural phenomena, a com- 

 pensation which will, it is true, long be denied to the many, 

 but is vouchsafed to the few familiar with the condition of 

 science. To them the increasing insight into the silent 

 operation of natural forces, whether in electro-magnetism or 

 in the polarisation of light, in the influence of diathermal 



* See my Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, 

 t. ii. 1827, p. 259; and Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico 

 (New York, 1843), vol. iii. pp. 271 and 336. 



