which they receive, in comparison with that transported into the Black Sea. This ice, which is looked upon as a barrier that opposes the navigation near the poles, and the discovery of the southern continent, proves only that there are large rivers adjacent to the places where it is met with; and indicates also there are vast continents from whence these rivers flow; nor ought we to be discouraged at the sight of these obstacles; for if we consider, we shall easily perceive, this ice must be confined to some particular places; that it is almost impossible that it should occupy the whole circle which encompasses, as we suppose, the southern continent, and therefore we should probably succeed if we were to direct our course towards some other point of this circle. The description which Dampier and some others have given of New Holland, leads us to suspect that this part of the globe is perhaps a part of the southern lands, and is a country less ancient than the rest of this unknown continent. New Holland is a low country, without water or mountains, but thinly inhabited, and the natives without industry; all this concurs to make us think that they are in this continent nearly what the savages of Amaconia or Paraguais are in America. We have found polished men, empires, and kings, at Peru and Mexico, which are the highest, and consequently the most ancient countries of America. Savages, on the contrary, are found in the lowest and most modern countries; therefore we may presume that we should also find men united by the bands of society in the upper countries, from whence these great rivers, which bring this prodigious ice to the sea, derive their sources. The interior parts of Africa are unknown to us, almost as much as they were to the ancients: they had, like us, made the tour of that vast peninsula, but they have left us neither charts, nor descriptions of the coasts. Pliny informs us, that the tour of Africa was made in the time of Alexander the Great, that the wrecks of some Spanish vessels had been discovered in the Arabian sea, and that Hanno, a Carthaginian general, had made a voyage from Gades to the Arabian sea, and that he had written a relation of it. Besides that, he says Cornelius Nepos tells us that in his time one Eudoxus, persecuted by the king Lathurus, was obliged to fly from his country; that departing from the Arabian gulph, he arrived at Gades, and that before this time they traded from Spain to Ethiopia by sea[173:A]. Notwithstanding these testimonies of the ancients, we are persuaded that they never doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and the course which the Portuguese took the first to go to the East-Indies, was looked upon as a new discovery; it will not perhaps, therefore, be deemed amiss to give the belief of the 9th century on this subject.