Attempts have been made in latter times, to rob COLUMBUS of the honour of having discovered _America_, by endeavouring to prove that the _West Indies_ were known in Europe before his first voyage. In some maps in the library of St Mark at Venice, said to have been drawn in 1436, many islands are inserted to the _west_ of Europe and Africa. The most _easterly_ of these are supposed in the first place to be the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verds. Beyond these, but at no great distance towards the _west_, occurs the _Ysola de Antillia_; which we may conclude, even allowing the date of the map to be genuine, to be a mere gratuitous or theoretic supposition, and to have received that strange name, because the obvious and natural idea of _Antipodes_ had been anathematized by Catholic ignorance. Still farther to the _north-west_, another fabulous island is laid down, under the strange appellation of _Delaman Satanaxia_, or the land created by the hand of Satan. This latter may possibly have some reference to an ignorant position of Iceland. Both were probably theoretic, for the fancied purpose of _preserving a balance_ on the globe with the continents and islands already known; an idea which was transferred by learned theorists, and even persisted in for a considerable part of the eighteenth century, under the name of the _Terra Australis incognita_; and was only banished by the enlightened voyages of scientific discovery, conducted under the auspices of our present venerable sovereign. The globe of Martin Behaim, in 1492, repeats the island of _Antillia_, and inserts beyond it to the _west_, the isle of St Brandan or Ima, from a fabulous work of the middle ages. Occasion has already occurred to notice two other ancient pretended discoveries of the New World: the fabulous voyages of the Zenos, another Venetian tale; and the equally fabulous Portuguese island of the _Seven Churches_, abounding in gold, and inhabited by Spanish or Portuguese Christians. Britain even had its Madoc prince of North Wales; and a _white_ nomadic nation in North America, speaking _Welsh_, is still among the puerile fancies of this nineteenth century.