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Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 



[A PI? a 



only were the great commercial importance of their discoveries rightly 

 understood. 



Whatever may have heen the amount of our acquaintance with the 

 Asiatic countries, and India in particular, previous to tiiat time, it would 

 serve us little to examine more particularly, excepting only as it affect- 

 ed the question of the maturity of science in past ages. That the in- 

 tercourse of the ancients was more extensive, even with the remotest 

 parts of Asia, than has heen usually admitted by European writers, 

 will unquestionably be agreed to on examination, and thus a multi- 

 plicity of customs, laws, and institutions be legitimately referred to a 

 common origin, which on any other supposition are altogether inex- 

 plicable. 



The Spaniards unexpectedly arriving at their destination by a much 

 shorter route than the Portuguese, left the latter uninterruptedly to 

 pursue the great design of reaching India by sailing easterly ; and of 

 the courage and boldness of the two nations, we may be disposed, on 

 mature reflection, to doubt whether the palm was not more justly due 

 to the Portuguese. It was indeed a bold step, after having advanced so 

 far to the south, to turn to the east, and realize in some sort the firsi 

 move to the circumnavigation of the globe, since it was in fact almost 

 on the very heels of the first adventures of the Portuguese that this 

 great problem was solved by Sir Francis Drake* and Oliver Vander 

 Woort. The voyages undertaken by the Spaniards and Dutch to the 

 Spice Islands were likewise as «tepping-stones to a greater achieve- 

 ment, the honour of which was reserved for our own country, just one 

 hundred years after Bernal Diaz rounded the Cape. 



And here it may be pardonable, in reference to the early commerce 

 of the ancients, to advert, though briefly, to the singular advantages, in 

 a geographical point of view, which the Jews possessed over every 

 other nation of the earth, inasmuch as that remarkable people, being 

 the chosen depositaries of institutions and laws pre-eminently superior 

 in their moral and social tendency, they were thus in a manner encou- 

 raged and counselled to the fulfilment of higher objects in the designs 

 of Providence, by the most extensive interchange of the commodities of 

 their own for those of other distant lands. Palestine, as it were, the 

 key to the commerce of the whole earth, was accessible to the shores of 

 India, Arabia, and the eastern coast of Africa, by a branch of the Red 

 Sea. By the Mediterranean its communications with the northern and 



* The motto given to Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth quaintly expressed hi* 

 merits—" Tu primus circumdecUsti me," surrounding a terrestrial globe. 



