Such an idea seems like a glimpse of far-reaching truths relative to the unwritten history of that recently explored Southern Ocean. When Columbus discovered the islands of the New World he found them lying in thickly clustered groups, and ere long he reached the mainland of a great continent, which lay in close vicinity to its island satellites. But it was altogether different with the Columbus of the Southern Ocean. A strange Antarctic, as well as an Australian continent lay there also, awaiting new discoverers; but far beyond their coasts the Pacific and Southern groups dotted the wide expanse of ocean like the stars that lose themselves in the abysses of night. We read with wonder, as strange as that which rewarded the revelations of the Western Ocean in the closing years of the fifteenth century, of the voyages and discoveries of Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and of Cook and later explorers of the South Pacific Ocean. When Captain Cook reached the Cape on his return from his second expedition, in 1774, he had sailed no less than twenty thousand leagues, through unknown seas, since he left the same point twenty months before. His grand quest was in search of the _Terra Australis Incognita_, a continent which it was assumed must exist in the Southern Ocean, as a counterpoise to the land occupying so large a portion of the northern hemisphere; but instead of this, the voyagers sailed for days and weeks through vast seas, arriving by chance, now and again, at some little island, cut off from all the world besides, yet tenanted by human beings. And, as later voyagers have noted, on sailing once more into the limitless horizon, after another long interval, in which many hundreds of miles have been passed, another island-speck appears; and not only is it inhabited, but affinities of speech, mythology, and the primitive ingenuity of native arts, all concur in proving a community of origin. The idea suggested to the sagacious naturalist is now very familiar to the scientific mind. The Pacific Ocean is pre-eminently an area of subsidence, where already not only implements of shell and stone, but probably carvings, sculptures, and even architectural structures, lie buried under the coral breccia of a modern cretacean formation, destined it may be, to puzzle the intelligent research of a remote future, when the northern hemisphere shall once more become the area of subsidence; and the islands of the Pacific will constitute the summits of mountain-chains in the _Terra Australis_ of that coming time.