OCliANIC DISCOVERIES. 271 



rrii latitudes. When tidings arrived from the coast of Cali- 

 fornia that the expedition of Cortez had perished, the wife of 

 the hero, Juana de Zuiiiga, the beautiful daughter of the 

 Count d'Aguilar, caused two ships to be fitted out and sent 

 forth to ascertain its fate.* Caliibrnia was already, in 1541, 

 recognized to be an arid, woodless peninsula — a fact that w^as 

 forgotten in the seventeenth century. We moreover gather 

 from the narratives of Balboa, Pedrarias Davila, and Hern an 

 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 en- 

 terprises, 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 overwrought 

 excitement, violence, and of a mania for discoveries by sea and 

 land — to favor individuality of character, and to enable some 

 highly-gifted minds to develop many noble germs drawn from 

 the depths of feeling. They err who believe that the Con- 

 quistadores were incited by love of gold and religious fanati 

 cism alone. Perils always exalt the poetry of life ; and, more- 

 over, the remarkable age, whose influence on the development 

 of cosmical ideas we are now depicting, gave to all enterprises, 

 and to the natural impressions 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 unex- 

 plored world, as unseen as that portion of the moon's surface 

 which the law of gravitation constantly averts from the glance 

 of the inhabitants 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 phe- 

 nomena — a compensation which will, it is true, long be de- 

 nied to the many, but is vouchsafed to the few familiar with 

 the condition of science. To them the increasing insight into 

 the Bilent operation of natural forces, whether in electro-mag- 

 netism or in the polarization of light, in the influence of dia- 



* See my Essai Politique sur Ic Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, t. 

 H., 1827, p. 259 ; and Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New 

 Vork. 1843). vol. iii., p 271 and 336. 



