Malaysia reveals a vast peninsula (Regio Patalis), which has suggested some obscure conception of the existence of Australia. A little later, in the middle of the century, New Guinea took its place as a northward promontory of the southern continent, after the discovery of part of its coast by Inigo Ortis de Retes, a Spanish navigator. Pursuing the course of Pacific exploration so far as it affects the Antarctic problem, we find that after Mendaña’s researches in that ocean had resulted in the discovery of some of its many islands, his Portuguese pilot on his second voyage, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, was inspired to petition for the command of a great expedition to the South Land, obtained his desire by promising the Pope and the King of Spain an untold expansion of their realms, respectively spiritual and temporal, and sailed in 1605 from Callão to discover an island of the group afterwards known as the New Hebrides, from which he returned satisfied in the belief of having performed his self-allotted task, and having taken possession of his “Australia del Espiritu Santo” in the name of his masters. Torres, his companion in command, proceeded through Torres Strait, and thus cut off New Guinea from the supposed continent, as afterwards Tasman did Australia itself, crowning the work of the Dutch navigators who had gradually unveiled the western shores of that vast island, working from the direction of the Malay Archipelago (Chapter VII). Tasman proceeded to discover the west coast of New Zealand, which thereupon succeeded to the position formerly occupied in the minds of the theorists by Java, New Guinea, and Australia as the northward extension of the Antarctic continent in these seas. Such ideas died hard: at the end of the previous century the conception of even Java as continental land survived, after a number of voyagers had sailed the seas to the south of it.