GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF OHIO. When Columbus found America it was supposed he had reached the eastern coast of Asia. As discovery progressed, names intended for that continent were strung along the Atlantic. One of them, the West Indies, to-day reminds us of the error, as well as Indian, the common name for the aborigines. It was by and by suspected that America was not Asia, but it was a long time before the reality of a vast continent was understood. Succeeding learned men made it consist of two very long and narrow bodies of land. South America, coasted by Cape Horn, was first delineated with some accuracy, but North America not until very much later. The feeble colonies along the Atlantic grew slowly, and not until two hundred and fifty years did they really begin to push over the mountains, and there met other colonies from the interior of the continent. The South Sea trade led to many voyages of discovery, and many energetic captains sailed up and down the coast striving and continually hoping to find some strait to the supposed near coast of Asia. We, in our day, read the early voyages as if the enterprising men who conducted them were voyaging purely for science and adventure, but, then, as now, business was energetic and commerce was reaching out its hands in every direction for larger profits. Only once did a romantic chevalier search for the visionary fountain of youth, and he may have thought that bottled it would be the most popular of mineral waters and there were “millions in it.” Cartier entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, but returned to France to get a new outfit to pursue the new sea channel to the west. The next year he entered the river, but still looked for a passage to Asia. He thought deep Saguenay led to the Northern Sea and continued up the St. Lawrence. Stopped by the rapids he was the first European who made the tour of the mountain, and named the place “Mount Royal.” The Indians reported to Cartier that there were three large lakes and a sea of fresh water without end, meaning, no doubt, lakes of middle New York and Ontario Sea. Cartier and his king, the great Francis, supposed he was in Asia. In a mercator map of 1569, the St. Lawrence is represented draining all the Upper Mississippi valley, while to the northwest is the eastern end of a vast fresh water sea (_dulce aquarum_) some five hundred or six hundred miles wide, of the extent of which the Indians of Canada, learning of it from the Indians of Saguenay, are ignorant. It looks on the map like Lake Huron, but careful geographers dropped this unfounded report of a great lake, and rightly. The Saguenay Indians no doubt meant the Lake St. John.