10 



degree of longitude. I am assured from the 

 comparison of a great number of journals, that 

 in the basin of the Atlantic Northern Ocean, 

 there exist two banks of weeds very different 

 from each other. The most extensive is a little 

 west of the meridian of Fayal, one of the Azores, 

 between the twenty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees 

 of latitude*. The temperature of the Ocean in 

 those latitudes is from sixteen to twenty degrees ; 

 and the north winds, which sometimes reign 

 there very tempestuously, drive floating isles of 

 sea-weed down into the low latitudes as far 

 as the parallels of twenty-four and even twenty 

 degrees. The vessels which return to Europe, 

 either from Montevideo or the Cape of Good 

 Hope, cross these banks of fucus, which the 

 Spanish pilots consider as at an equal distance 

 from the Antilles and Canaries ; and they 

 serve the less instructed mariner to rectify his 

 longitude. The second bank of fucus is but 



* It appears that Phoenician vessels came " in thirty days 

 sail, with an easterly wind," to the weedy sea, which the Por- 

 tugueze and Spaniards call mar de zargasso. 1 have shown 

 in another place, that the passage of Aristotle, De Mirabil. 

 ed. Duval, p. 1157, can scarcely be applied to the coasts of 

 Africa, like an analogous passage of the Periplus of Scylax. 

 Tableaux de la Nature, t. i, p. 98. Supposing that this sea, 

 full of weeds, which impeded the course of the Phoenician ves- 

 sels, was the mar de zargasso, we need not admit, that the an- 

 cients traversed the Atlantic beyond thirty degrees of west 

 longitude from the meridian of Paris. 



