59 
on any good evidence*. I shall not decide the 
question, whether Gemelli visited China or 
Persia ; but, having travelled in the interior of 
Mexico a great part of the road, which the 
Italian traveller so minutely describes, I can 
affirm it to be no less certain,^ that Gemelli was 
in Mexico, at Acapulco, and the small villages of 
Mazatlan and of San Augustin de las Cuevas, 
than that Pallas has been in the Crimea, and 
Mr. Salt in Abyssinia. Gemelli’s descriptions 
have that local tint, which is the principal charm 
of the narratives of travels, written by the most 
unlettered men ; and which can be given only by 
those who have been ocular witnesses of what 
they describe. A respectable ecclesiastic, Abb6 
Clavigero^, who traversed Mexico almost half a 
century before me, had already undertaken the 
defence of the author del Giro del Mondo ; and 
has very justly observed, that, had Gemelli never 
left Italy, it was impossible that he could have 
spoken with so much accuracy of persons, who 
lived in his time, of the convents of the city of 
Mexico, and of the churches of several villages, 
the names of which were unknown in Europe. 
The same tone of veracity, and we must insist 
on this point, does not appear in the notions, 
which the author professes to have borrowed 
* Robertson’s History of America, 1803, vol. iii, p. 41B. 
t Storia Antka di Messico^ vol. i, p. 24. 
