Seneca. Pliny has no fixed principles as to the form and extent of the earth; he floats between Hipparchus and Eratosthenes; his ideas as to the relative greatness of the three parts of the world are expressed by the following figures: Europe, 1-3rd 1-8th of the continent; Asia, 1-4th 1-14th; and Africa, 1-5th 1-60th. Knowing little of the value of the different Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian stadia, he estimates them all at eight stadia for a Roman mile. Hence arise numberless errors-errors which are increased by his want of critical judgment. But, in the midst of them, how many precious ideas are for the first time brought together!

Under the elegant pen of Pomponius Mela, who lived nearly at the same epoch, geography gains neither in exactness nor certainty. Like Pliny, he neglects to compare; he confounds old and new relations. He reproduces the system of Eratosthenes, and the doubts as to the communication of the Caspian with the ocean. His course of the Oxus is tolerably laid down; he knew that the Sarmatians had extended their possessions to the Baltic, and that Scandinavia is divided from the neighbouring islands. Herodotus is his guide with respect to India and Scythia; and this is sufficient to prove that he was behind his contemporaries in knowledge. For the African coast he follows, but as an unfaithful copyist, the Periplus of Hanno. He admits the probability of the junction of the Niger and Nile, but he rejects the hypothesis of its subterraneous march, so singular in the Roman naturalist's description. He places the source of his Niger, or Nuchul, in Ethiopia; and adds this important observation: "While other streams flow towards the ocean, this directs its course towards the east and the centre of the continent, where it is lost, without its being known where its course ends." Might it not be said that Mela guessed, eighteen hundred years ago, the state in which our knowledge of the Joliba was, till within a few years?

To the first century of the Christian era probably belongs that nautical and commercial Itinerary, which is known under the title of the Periplas of the Erythræan Sea, and the geographical abridgment by Dionysius Periegetes, written in excellent Greek verses, which bespeak that the author was a reader of Homer. Another Itinerary, by Isidore, of Charax, gives many geographical details relative to the Parthian empire. Towards the close of the same century, the wants of luxury conducted commerce into Upper Asia, and as far as Serica, on which a merchant, named Titianus, published subsequently some imperfect notions. From new Roman expeditions it was learned that Africa extended towards the south much further then was generally supposed. Marinus of Tyre consulted the works of authors who had written before him, and formed a complete body of geography, in which are discussed the new maps constructed by him. We know his works only by the extracts of Ptolemy.

At the beginning of the second century, the conquests of Trajan, while they aggrandized the

empire, extended equally the bounds of geography. Dacia and Mesopotamia were well known. To this epoch also belongs the origin of some of those celebrated Itineraries, which the masters of the world caused to be composed, to direct the march of their armies, and the possession of which by an individual was high treason. The Itinerary of the emperor Antoninus, which, without proof, is attributed to Ethicus, seems to be a union of old and new road-guides. The Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum appears to be a road-map given to some imperial functionary. The fragment which we possess gives, in the greatest detail, the route from Bourdeaux to Jerusalem. Lastly, the Table of Peutinger, much more considerable than the preceding, and which Mannert supposes to belong to the reign of the emperor Severus, comprehends in its singular outline, not only the Roman empire, but the furthest limits of the earth which were then known, especially to the east. We see there the country of the Seres, the mouth of the Ganges, the Island of Ceylon, and roads laid down even in the heart of India.

We at last reach the epoch when the geography of the ancients sought to support itself on scientific foundations. It is in the hands of Ptolemy, who raises it to the dignity of a mathematical science. The work of this celebrated manis only an elementary and geometrical picture, where the figure and size of the earth, and the position of the places, are determined. The division of the countries is merely indicated, and it is rarely that the author adds an historical note. His text, as it has come down to us, seems to have been often disfigured by the negligence of transcribers and editors. But, though many grave errors must be attributed to them, there are a great number which really belong to the geographer himself; they seem to derive their origin from the measures which he employs. We see that he has mistaken the extension which he ought to have given to the longitudes; he has falsified them to the amount of 2-7ths. Such is the opinion of the learned Gosselin, who establishes it by the irresistible force of calculation.

Nevertheless, in spite of these defects, the work of Ptolemy rises like a brilliant pharos in the midst of the night of time. It shows us in detail countries which had never seen the eagles of Rome, and which, for ten subsequent centuries, were never spoken of but upon the faith of its descriptions. When stripped of its errors, it offers to view the whole geographical knowledge of the second century of the Christian era.

If we begin the exposition of that knowledge by a reference to Africa, we shall find that the form of that part of the world is entirely changed by Ptolemy. He does not, like Pliny and Strabo, admit the communication of the Atlantic with the Erythræan Sea; he thinks that the western coast of that continent, after having formed a gulf of moderate depth, extends indefinitely between the south and west, while the eastern, beyond Cape Prasum, rejoins the Asiatic coast to the south of Catigara. The interior of his

second centuries. It is Festus Avienus, a frigid imitator of the beautiful verses of Dionysius Periegetes, who, without being aware of it, renders an eminent service to the critical history of geography, by inserting in his Ora Maritima, though in a confused manner, the traditions of the Carthaginians, relative to the voyages which their navigators had performed along the shores of Spain, Albion, and the Gauls. We glean also some useful particulars in the geography of Ethicus, preserved by Orosius, in various Notices of the Provinces, and in the geographical dictionaries of Vibius Sequester for the Roman world, and Eusebius for the places mentioned in Holy Writ. Jornandes has transmitted to us some valuable knowledge respecting the migrations of the Goths and Huns, and details as to the geography of the north and east of Europe, in the sixth century. In the eighth, a Goth, whose name is unknown, but who is commonly called the "Geographer of Ravenna," gives a description of the world as it was known in his time; and, in reading him, we are astonished to observe the great number of geographers who are lost to us, but to whom he refers as his authorities.

In the meanwhile, as early as the seventh century, the pilgrimages of the Christians had began to revive the spirit of observation. The works of the Fathers of the church mention a throng of pious travellers. This is a mine which has not been sufficiently worked, and which, even with reference alone to geography and the history of nations, contains treasures.

As early as the fourth century, St. Jerome affirms that there came to Jerusalem pilgrims from India, Ethiopia, Britain, and Hibernia. At a later period, Adaman composed a description of the holy places, from what had been related to him by St. Arculph. The relations of the pilgrimages of Willibald, (730,) and of Bernard, a French monk, (780,) to the holy sepulchre, are also geographical monuments of the middle age, as well as the journey of Haiton, from Basil to Constantinople. Even maps belonging to this barbarous age are mentioned. St. Gall, the founder of the celebrated abbey which bears his name, and who lived in the seventh century, possessed one of these maps, which a historian of the convent describes as mappam subtili opere an elegantly designed map. The three silver Tables of Charlemagne are well known, on which were represented the whole world, and the cities of Rome and Constantinople; and Sprengel even cites a manuscript in the Turin library, composed in 787, which contains a chart, which is the more valuable because it comprises all the then known world, and may serve to eiucidate the geographer of Ravenna.

Let us quit for a moment the men of the west, bent beneath the yoke of ignorance, and turn to a people whose genius, awakened by Mahomet, relighted the torch of science and literature in ancient Asia, the birthplace of civilization, and made it shine equally on those African lands which have since become the seat of barbarism.

Geography is indebted to the Arabs for a new impulse and new discoveries. From the period of their first conquests, the caliphs ordered their generals to furnish descriptions of the conquered countries. In 883 the caliph Mamoun caused to be measured, by the three brothers Ben Schaker, a degree of latitude, in the desert of Sangiar, between Racca and Palmyra. This measurement, repeated near the city of Kufa, served to determine the magnitude of the earth. Without pausing on the journey of the eight Arabs of Lisbon, known by the name of almagrurim, or wanderers, a journey the result of which is uncertain, we remark, from the ninth century, among the votaries of Islamism, a taste for adventurous ramblings, and a passion for discoveries. Then, two zealous observers, Wahad and Abuzeid, traversed and described, from 851 to 877, the most remote countries of Asia, which had escaped the knowledge of the ancients. The narrative of their journey, translated into French by Renaudot, was regarded with incredulity till its authenticity was perfectly demonstrated by de Guignes. Unfortunately, the lapse of time, ignorance of the language, and a thousand other circumstances, have made us lose most of the geographical monuments of the Arabians; a great number of them are known to us only through those persons who have availed themselves of them. Some of their writers have, however, reached us, either in extracts or complete. We will remark that the tenth century gave birth to the works of Massoudi, full of curious details upon Africa, India, and Middle Asia; that, in the same century, Ebn Haukal traced pictures, equally instructive and interesting, of all the countries subjected to the religion of the prophet, and treated superficially the parts inhabited by the Nazarenes or Christians, because his love for wisdom and regular governments left him nothing to praise or to cite among those nations. The twelfth century shows us Edrisi, usually denominated the Nubian geographer, possessed of all the science of his compatriots, and the knowledge of the west, united at the court of Roger, king of Sicily. The thirteenth century was enriched by the Marvellous Pearl of Ebn al Wardi, a work full of curious details on natural history, and on the geography of Africa, Arabia, and Syria; but very concise on Europe, India, and Northern Asia. In the fourteenth century we meet with other celebrated names. More methodical than his predecessors, Abul Feda, instead of merely imitating them by proceeding confusedly from east to west, described each country in a separate chapter, gave the latitudes and longitudes of each place, in tables arranged according to the climates, expatiated on mathematical geography, and most considerable seas, rivers, and mountains, of the world, and cited his authorities.

In publishing the Wonders of Omnipotence on Earth, El Bakoui delighted to describe the places which had witnessed the glory of true believers, and the cities celebrated for the monuments of their genius, and their schools of learning. Ebn

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Batuta, an intrepid traveller, twice traversed Africa in two opposite directions, from the north to the south, and from the east to the northeast; he visited the mysterious Timbuctoo, and the country of Melli; and his representations agree, in almost all points, with the most recent of the modern travellers.

This list of Arabian geographers, or travellers, in which we have inscribed only the most eminent and important, ends in the fifteenth century with Leo, whose description of Africa, an inexhaustible mine of curious information, connects in some measure the geography of the middle age with modern geography.

On collecting into a whole the knowledge of the Arabs, we find that it was of consequence only with respect to the Mussulman countries, visited by their merchants, or conquered by their arms. In Asia, they bring out Arabia from its obscurity, they add new notions to those which existed as to Syria and Persia; they expatiate on the countries to the north of India, and it was from them that were derived the only ideas which we had relative to ancient Bactriana, and Transoxiana, or Marawalhnar, the remotest Arab state to the north; they revealed the real figure and extent of the Caspian from south to north; they dwelt upon the provinces by which it is surrounded; traced a commercial line from Samarcand to Can-fu in ancient China; comprehended also the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, the Maldive Isles, Madagascar, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and the Moluccas; became indistinct and uncertain beyond the Ganges; and are of no authority respecting the north of Asia, in those icy countries where the great rivers of the Obi, the Yenesei, and the Lena, water the Tungusian deserts.

With Europe the Arabs were much less acquainted; with the exception of Spain, the Mediterranean isles, and the parts of Italy in which they had planted their standard, they had but very disjointed notions of the rest. Yet it is difficult to conceive how they contrived to collect precise notices on Ireland, Paris, England, the duchy of Sleswick, and a portion of Russia, while they showed themselves utterly ignorant of the neighbouring countries.

It is in Africa that their geography has a solid importance. The Arabs spread themselves from Egypt to the Straits of Gibraltar, and to the west, passed Cape Bojador, which so long stopped the Portuguese. From the tenth century, they frequented Eastern Africa, from Egypt to Cape Corrientes. Melinda, Mombaza, and Sofala, flourished as early as the twelfth century. Modern geographies supply no later information than that of the Arabs, with respect to interior Africa. They knew the great river of Nigritia, which they almost identified with the Nile, but only at its source; and in the first part of its course they directed it towards the west, and most frequently placed its mouth in a sea or in the ocean, at the distance of a day's journey from a certain isle called Ulil, which plays a great part in their system. The source of our Joliba seems to have

been unknown to them; it is entirely out of the sphere of their excursions to the south-west, which did not extend beyond Jinné. To the west, Edrisi mentions the Zuuhagi, a tribe which gave its name to the river Senega or Senegal. The Rio do Ouro, under the Arabic denomination of Wadimel, and the country of Meghzara, with the city or Isle of Ulil, terminate the Arabian geography to the west, as does the country of Lamian or Lamlen to the south.

In the interior of Soudan, that geography indicates to us the cities of Tocrur, celebrated for gold-mines; Sallah and Berassa, peopled by an exceedingly brave race of blacks; Gana and Timbuctoo, rendered powerful by their commerce. Eastward of the last city, it extends as far as Bornou; to the south, it reaches the country of Melli, and, on that side, also, the mountains of Kong, the kingdom of Dahomy, and some other points of maritime Guinea. There is nothing to show that the Sierra Leone coast, Kuranko, Sulimana, Kissi, and Sangara, were ever visited by Arabian travellers. Their writers are silent concerning those countries.

It is to be regretted that, while they were enlarging on all sides the world known by the ancients, the Arabs did not introduce into their writings that clearness and precision of which the Greeks and Romans had furnished them with models. Political and religious despotism checked among them the soaring of thought, and the spirit of investigation. They translated Ptolemy, whose insufficiency their discoveries rendered obvious. Where those discoveries did not enlighten them, they took Strabo and Pomponius Mela for guides, and went astray. Their astronomical observations were not correct enough to reform the geographical system of the men of the Alexandrian school. They endeavoured to determine the latitudes of places by the duration of the longest days; they divided into climates the world as it was known in their days, and each climate into a certain number of regions. The Itineraries alone served them to fix the respective distances; their maps were not laid down according to any projection. In their hands positive geography made but little progress. Their brilliant enterprises, their adventurous expeditions, seemed to promise more extensive results.

We must now quit the Arabian camps, the beautiful regions of the east, and turn our view towards other countries, less favoured by nature. A people no less fanatic and brave than the armed apostles of the prophet, the people of Odin, re-appear upon the scene, under the name of Normans, Varegues and Ostmen; it takes the sea for the theatre of its exploits, and in the barks of Scandinavian pirates sail instructed navigators and voyagers eager to make discoveries. The memory of the services which they rendered to geography has been preserved to us by king Alfred, by Adam of Bremen, by the Heims-Kringla, an historical work from the pen of Snorro, written in the twelfth century, by various other Icelandic chronicles, and by

the chart of the two brothers, the Zeni. The west obtained a knowledge of the northern regions from the perspicuous and precise extract of two Scandinavian relations, which Alfred the Great inserted in his Anglo-Saxon version of Orosius. The first shows the Norwegian Ohter retracing his voyages from Halgoland, in Norway to Biarmia on the east of the White Sea, and, on another side, along the Norwegian and Danish coasts, by the Sound, to the city of Hæethum, or Sleswick. The other relation is that of the Dane Wulfstan, from Sleswick to Truso, a commercial city in the country of Estum or Prussia.

Alfred comprehends in Scandinavia the following countries:-Biarmia, Finnmarkia, Quinland, Gothia, Sweden, Norway, and Denniark. The most ancient name to designate all the Scandinavian countries, which were inhabited by the Goths, seems to have been that of Mannaheim, (the country of men,) a name which the middle age Latin energetically translated by the equivalent of these words, the manufactory of the human race.

The description of the Baltic by Wulfstan, published by Alfred, is much more complete than that of Eginhard, who was acquainted only with the eastern extremity. Wulfstan mentions Prussia also, under the name of Witland. The same voyager, like his compatriots, gives the appellation of Estians to all the tribes who live to the east of the Vistula. The Scandinavians likewise describe Poland, which is called Pulinaland in the Sagas. It is the Wislaland of Alfred, or country of the Vistula.

From the ninth century, the most distant shores of the North Sea were visited by the Normans. Distant as it is from their country, they visited Ireland very early, perhaps as far back as the seventh century. They founded there the kingdoms of Dublin, Ulster, and Connaught, which were long tributary to them; they made more exactly known the Orkney and Shetland isles. They settled in Caithness, the most northerly district of Scotland. They conquered, in 893, the Hebudes of the ancients, which are stretched along the western coast of Scotland, and which were dependencies of Norway till 1266. Boldness or chance led them, in 861, to the Feroe isles, a distant archipelago, which seemed to announce other lands. About the same epoch their navigators landed on Iceland, and, which seems not a little extraordinary, they estimated the true circumference of it in a manner which agrees with the modern observations of French astronomers. Indefatigable mariners, they never paused; about 982 they reached the shores of Greenland. It has been asserted that this country, as well as Iceland, was known before this period; but nothing is more uncertain or less supported by proof. What seems to be indubitable is, that it was peopled by Scandinavian Icelanders; that their establish ments were precarious; that two towns were built there, Garda, and Hrattalid; that the most eastern and the most southern part of the west

coast of Greenland alone deserves, from its vivid summer verdure, its groves of birch, and the perfume of its flowers, the name of Green Land, which it received from the Icelanders. It is, consequently, here that we must place one of the two Scandinavian colonies. For the other, we must seek to the north of Cape Desolation. Ruins of hamlets and churches still exist, to support the probability of these two identities.

Here rises to view a question of far greater importance-Did the Normans discover America before Columbus?

The histories of Snorro, those of Torfæus and Jonas Arngrim, the old annals of Iceland, by Hawk, and the dissertations of Suhm, have preserved the memory of the discoveries made by Leif, son of Eric Rauda, and by the Icelander Biorn. In the year 1001, the latter, seeking his father in Greenland, was driven by a tempest far to the south-west, where he discovered a flat country, quite covered with wood, and extremely fertile. He returned, Lief joined him, and the bold adventurers found again the recently discovered coast. The air appeared mild to Greenlanders; the sun remained eight hours above the horizon on the shortest day, which marks about forty-nine degrees of latitude. This land, in which the wild vine grew, was named Vinland, or the vine country. Establishments were formed there, but nothing indicates that they were lasting; they were, however, still existing in the first half of the twelfth century, an epoch when a bishop, Eric, went to Vinland, to convert his fellow countrymen, who were yet Pagans.

Where now are we to seek for this country of Vinland? The narratives of the old historians to which we have referred, seem to place it on the coast of North America. It is to the narratives of the brothers Zēni, and the map of their navigation, that we must look for a solution of this difficult question.

The noble Venetians, of whom we speak, visited again, either in 1380, or from 1391 to 1392, the country discovered by the Scandinavians, or at least collected a description of it, which, notwithstanding much obscurity, seems to confirm the Icelandic relations. From the learned researches of Buache and Eggers, it seems that the Frisland of the Venetian brothers must be the Feroe archipelago. The countries to which the Zeni give the names of Engroneland and Grolandia may apply to the south-east coast of Greenland, inaccurately laid down and enormously extended on the map of the Venetians. As to the two coasts named Estotiland and Droceo, indicated, in the same map and relation, as being more than a thousand miles to the west of Frisland or Feroe, and to the south of Greenland, it would seem that this position, and the particularities of their discovery, agree perfectly with Newfoundland, and to the Scandinavian colony of Vinland. This theory has been learnedly discussed by Malte-Brun; and we agree with him, that the new world was visited by the people of the north, about the year 1000 of the Christian era.