To come down, however, to a later period, the editor is enabled, through the researches of his lamented friend, the late learned and laborious Vicomte de Santarem, to show from early manuscript maps and other geographical monuments, how this belief in the existence of a great southern continent was entertained anterior to the discoveries of the Portuguese in the Pacific Ocean. In his _Essai sur l’Histoire de la Cosmographie et de la Cartographie du Moyen Age_, vol. i, p. 229, the Vicomte informs us that “Certain cartographers of the middle ages, still continue to represent the _Antichthone_ in their maps of the world in accordance with their belief that, beyond the ocean of Homer, there was an inhabited country, another temperate region, called the “opposite earth,” which it was impossible to reach, principally on account of the torrid zone. “The following are the maps of the world which represent this theory:— “1. The map of the world in a manuscript of Macrobius, of the tenth century; 2. The map of the world, in a manuscript of the eighth century in the Turin library; 3. That of Cecco d’Ascoli, of the thirteenth century; 4. The small map of the world, in one of the manuscripts of the thirteenth century, of _l’Image du Monde_, by Gauthier de Metz, MS. No. 7791, Bibliothèque Impériale, Paris; 5. That of an Icelandic manuscript of the thirteenth century, taken from the _Antiquitates Americanæ_; 6. That in a manuscript of Marco Polo, of the fourteenth century (1350), in the Royal Library of Stockholm; 7. That on the reverse of a medal of the fifteenth century, in the Cabinet of M. Crignon de Montigny. “The cartographers of the middle ages have admitted that as a reality which, even to the geographers of antiquity, was merely a theory.” The earliest _assertion_ of the discovery of a land bearing a position on early maps analogous to that of Australia has been made in favour of the Chinese, who have been supposed to have been acquainted with its coasts long before the period of European navigation to the east. Thevenot, in his _Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux_, part i, Preface: Paris, 1663, says: “The southern land, which now forms a fifth part of the world, has been discovered at different periods. The Chinese had knowledge of it long ago, for we see that Marco Polo marks two great islands to the south-east of Java, which it is probable that he learned from the Chinese.” The statements of Marco Polo, which we quote from Marsden’s translation, run thus:—