There is nothing surprising in Bonaparte's cordial approval of the enterprise. One has only to study the volumes in which M. Frederic Masson has collected the papers and memoranda relating to Napoleon's youth and early manhood to realise how intensely keen was his interest in geography and travel. In one of those interesting works is a document occupying eight printed pages, in which Napoleon had summarised a geographical textbook, with a view to the more perfect mastery of its contents.* (* See Masson's Napoleon Inconnu; Papiers Inedits; Paris 1895 volume 2 page 44. The text-book was that of Lacroix.) It is curious to note how little the young scholar was able to ascertain about Australasia from the volume from which he learnt the elements of that science for which, with his genius for strategy and tactics, he must have had an instinctive taste. "La Nouvelle Guinee, la Carpentarie, la Nouvelle Hollande," etc., figure in his notes as the countries forming the principal part of the southern hemisphere now grouped under the denomination of Australasia; "la Carpentarie" thus signalised as a separated land being simply the northern region of Australia proper, the farthest limit of which is Cape York.* (* Mallet's Description de l'Univers (Frankfort 1686) mentions "Carpenterie" as being near the "Terre des Papous," and as discovered by the Dutch captain, Carpenter.) It is not a little interesting, that when, in April 1800, twenty sculptors were commissioned to execute as many busts of great men to adorn the Galerie des Consuls, the only Englishmen among the honoured score were Marlborough and Dampier.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat 1 267.) It is curious to find the adventurous ex-buccaneer in such noble company as that of Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, and George Washington, but the fact that he was among the selected heroes may be taken as another evidence of Bonaparte's interest in the men who helped to find out what the world was like. Perhaps if somebody had seen him reading Dampier's Voyages, as he read Cook's on the way to Egypt, that fact would have been instanced as another proof, not of his fondness for extremely fascinating literature, but of the nourishment of a secret passion to seize the coasts which Dampier explored.