[Sidenote: Minor voyages and travels.] In the midst of these immortal works it is hardly worth while to speak of minor things. Two centuries had wrought a mighty change in the geographical ideas of Western Europe. The travels of Marco Polo, A.D. 1295, had first given some glimmering of the remote East, the interest in which was doubtless enhanced by the irruption of the Moguls. Sir John Mandeville had spent many years in the interior of Asia before the middle of the next century. Conti had travelled in Persia and India, between 1419 and 1444. Cadamosto, a Venetian, in 1455 had explored the west coast of Africa. Sebastian Cabot had re-discovered Newfoundland, and, persisting in the attempt to find a north-west passage to China, had forced his way into the ice to 67° 30' N. By 1525 the American coast-line had been determined from Terra del Fuego to Labrador. New Guinea and part of Australia, had been discovered. The fleet of Cabral, attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope in 1500, was driven to Brazil. A ship was sent back to Portugal with the news. Hence, had not Columbus sailed when he did, the discovery of America could not have been long postponed. Balboa saw the Great South Sea September 25th, 1513. Wading up to his knees in the water, with his sword in one hand and the Spanish flag in the other, he claimed that vast ocean for Castile. Nothing could now prevent the geography of the earth from being completed. [Sidenote: Participation of other nations in these events.] I cannot close these descriptions of maritime adventure without observing that they are given from the European point of view. The Western nations have complacently supposed that whatever was unknown to them was therefore altogether unknown. We have seen that the Arabs were practically and perfectly familiar with the fact that Africa might be circumnavigated; the East Indian geography was thoroughly understood by the Buddhist priesthood, who had, on an extensive scale, carried forward their propagandism for twenty-five hundred years in those regions. But doubtless the most perfect geographical knowledge existed among the Jews, those cosmopolite traders who conducted mercantile transactions from the Azores to the interior of China, from the Baltic to the coast of Mozambique. It was actually through them that the existence of the Cape of Good Hope was first made known in Europe. Five hundred years before Columbus, the Scandinavian adventurers had discovered America, but so low was the state of intelligence in Europe that the very memory of these voyages had been altogether lost. The circumnavigation of the earth is, however, strictly the achievement of the West. I have been led to make the remarks in this paragraph, since they apply again on another occasion--the introduction of what is called the Baconian philosophy, the principles of which were not only understood, but carried into practice in the East eighteen hundred years before Bacon was born.