The sixth is a map in a Portolano at the Depôt de la Guerre, Paris, drawn in 1555 by Guillaume le Testu, a pilot of Grasse, in Provence, or as others have thought a Norman. André Thevet, cosmographer to Henry II, boasts of having often sailed with him, and always styles him as “renommé pilote et singulier navigateur.” The map was drawn for Admiral Coligny, to whom it is dedicated and whose name it bears. The editor has succeeded in procuring a tracing of that portion which affects the present question, and finds it to agree with the other maps of the kind in the delineation of the coast of “la Grande Java.” On the reduced tracing of the most fully detailed of these maps given at p. xxvii, are inscribed some names of bays and coasts which were noticed in the first instance by Alexander Dalrymple, the late hydrographer to the Admiralty and East India Company, to bear a resemblance to the names given by Captain Cook to parts of New Holland which he had himself discovered. In his memoir concerning the Chagos and adjacent islands, 1786, p. 4, speaking of this map he says:—“The east coast of New Holland, as we name it, is expressed with some curious circumstances of correspondence to Captain Cook’s MS. What he names Bay of Inlets, is in the MS. called Bay Perdue. Bay of Isles R. de beaucoup d’Isles. Where the Endeavour struck Coste dangereuse. So that we may say with Solomon, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’” To the discredit of so well informed and laborious a man as Dalrymple, to whom, perhaps, next to Hakluyt, this country is the most largely indebted for its commercial prosperity, this passage was but an invidious insinuation, intended to disparage the credit of Captain Cook, of whose appointment to the command of the _Endeavour_ he was extremely jealous. Dalrymple had earnestly desired the command of an expedition to discover the great southern continent, the existence of which he had endeavoured to prove by various philosophical arguments, which later times have shown to be not without foundation; and his observation would seem to imply that Cook, who had been so successful in his discoveries on the coast of New Holland, might have been led thereto by an acquaintance with this pre-existent map. The unworthy insinuation met with a sensible refutation, we are happy to record, from the pen of a Frenchman, M. Frederic Metz, in a paper printed at p. 261, vol. 47, of _La Revue, ou Decade Philosophique, Littéraire et Politique_, Nov., 1805. For the sake of clearness, the editor avoids here giving the whole of M. Metz’s paper, in which an attempt is made to disprove that New Holland was discovered at this time by the Portuguese at all, but will merely quote those passages which meet Dalrymple’s insinuation. M. Metz says:—