be eagerly bent upon performing this voyage." In these letters we have outlined by Toscanelli the very voyage that Columbus took in 1492, eighteen years after he had received this precious information. In his journal of that voyage he makes mention of "_the islands marked on the chart_"; he was constantly seeking the island of Atlantis, and hoped eventually to arrive at the great and noble city of Quinsai, as well as at Cipango and Cathay. As for the "Grand Khan"--of whom he had been informed by Toscanelli, who obtained his information from Marco Polo's works--he not only sent an embassy in search of him, when in Cuba, but was looking for him throughout all his voyages. It is well known that Columbus was not aware that he had really discovered a new world, but to the end of his days believed he had merely arrived at the eastern coast of India. So persistent was he in this belief that he falsified documents, and forced his crew to swear to what they did not know--namely, that Cuba was a continent, and not an island! He believed he had arrived at Cipango, when he heard the Indian word, _cibao_, on the coast of Hispaniola; and he says, in a letter written to Luis Santangel in 1493, "In Espanola there are gold-mines, and thence to terra firma, as well as thence to the Grand Khan, everything is on a splendid scale." Also, "When I arrived at Juana [Cuba], I followed the coast to the westward, and found it so extensive that I considered it must be a continent and a _province of Cathay_!" Columbus, it has been said by some investigators, was a man of one idea--and that idea not his own! "It is impossible," says Washington Irving, in his _Life of Columbus_--which is, throughout, an elegant but labored apology for its hero--"to determine the precise time when Columbus first conceived the design of seeking a western route to India. It is certain, however, that he meditated it as early as the year 1474, though as yet it lay crude and unmatured in his mind." The year 1474, as we know, was that in which Toscanelli sent him the letter and the chart. In that letter the route to India was laid down, and on that chart it was made clear to any seafaring man how Cathay might be reached, by merely sailing westward! By setting his helm, and persisting in a westerly course, any one might reach the coast that was supposed to lie opposite to Europe and Africa. Columbus did that, according to directions received from Toscanelli eighteen years before. He did nothing more, and he reached, not the coast of India, but the outlying islands of a new world since called America.