How very little was known, with any precision, about the operations of Kerguelen, when Captain Cook sailed in 1776, may be inferred from the following paragraph of his instructions:--"You are to proceed in search of some islands said to have been lately seen by the French in the latitude of 48° S., and in the meridian of the Mauritius." This was, barely, the amount of the very indefinite and imperfect information, which Captain Cook himself had received from Baron Plettenberg at the Cape of Good Hope, in November 1772; in the beginning of which year Kerguelen's first voyage had taken place. The captain, on his return homeward, in March 1775, heard, a second time, something about this French discovery at the Cape, where he met with Monsieur Crozet, who very obligingly communicated to him a chart of the southern hemisphere, wherein were delineated not only his own discoveries, but also that of Captain Kerguelen. But what little information that chart could convey, was still necessarily confined to the operations of the first voyage; the chart here referred to, having been published in France in 1773, that is, before any intelligence could possibly be conveyed from the southern hemisphere of the result of Kerguelen's second visit to this new land, which, we now know, happened towards the close of the same year. Of these latter operations, the only account (if that can be called an account, which conveys no particular information) received by Captain Cook from Monsieur Crozet, was, that a later voyage had been undertaken by the French, under the command of Captain Kerguelen, which had ended much to the disgrace of that commander. What Crozet had not communicated to our author, and what we are sure, from a variety of circumstances, he had never heard of from any other quarter, he missed an opportunity of learning at Teneriffe. He expressed his being sorry, as we have just read, that he did not know sooner that there was on board the frigate an officer who had been with Kerguelen, as he might have obtained from him more interesting information about this land, than its situation. And, indeed, if he had conversed with that officer, he might have obtained information more interesting than he was aware of; he might have learnt that Kerguelen had actually visited this southern land a second time, and that the little isle of which he then received the name and position from the Chevalier de Borda, was a discovery of this later voyage. But the account conveyed to him, being, as the reader will observe, unaccompanied with any date, or other distinguishing circumstance, he left Teneriffe, and arrived on the coasts of Kerguelen's Land, under a full persuasion that it had been visited only once before. And, even with regard to the operations of that first voyage, he had nothing to guide him, but the very scanty materials afforded to him by Baron Plettenberg and Monsieur Crozet.