258 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



ties in the character of conquerors. Such homn^ was never 

 paid hy conquerors to the vanquished, unit I 

 in possession of indisputable superiority in arts, or in the forms 

 of their institutions, and then the consequence is natural. We 



see the proofs of it in the Turkish imitations of the Byzan- 

 . and in the .Mon^olic of the Chinese. 

 The foot of Man lias pressed many a soil which later trav- 

 ellers assume was never trodden before them. Navigating 

 antiquity knew many geographical facts that scholastic preju- 

 dice neglected for the sake of grammatical pursuits. From 

 King Alfred's writings we know the voyage of Othere towards 

 the North Pole ; and that even from England navigators vis- 

 ited distant seas in the ninth century. Dicuil's incidental 

 notice of Iceland, in the beginning of the same aire, was not 

 observed till of late years. The Scandinavian discover}- 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 discovery of Newfoundland by the 

 brothers Zeni, Venetian navigators, seventy years before the 

 voyage of Columbus, according to Cardinal Zurla. Docu- 

 ments published at Copenhagen prove the same coast to have 

 been repeatedly visited by the Northmen from the years 9S0 

 and 1000 to 13S0 ; and the Biscayen whalers seem to have 

 equally known this region by an accidental south-easterly 

 storm, which drove them from their fishing station off the 

 Irish shores, in the reign of King Henry VI., that is, about 

 1450; and all this incredulity 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 Andrea Bianca, bearing date 1436, still in the library of St. 

 Marc at Venice. Columbus himself found the rudder of a ship 

 cast on the beach at Guadaloupe. This would be a natural 

 consequence of any ship being disabled, and driven to the 

 south-west, till ;t falls in with the trade winds, which, perpetu- 



