The tardy and piecemeal fashion in which definiteness was given to southern latitudes on the map of the world makes a curious chapter in the history of geographical research. After the ships of Magellan and Drake had circumnavigated the globe, and a very large part of America had been mapped, there still lay, south of the tracks of those adventurers who rounded the Horn and breasted the Pacific, a region that remained unknown--a Terra Australis, Great Southern Continent, or Terra Incognita as it was vaguely and variously termed. Map-makers, having no certain data concerning this vast uncharted area, commonly sprawled across the extremity of the southern hemisphere a purely fanciful outline of imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or one of the other designations just mentioned. The configuration of the territory on different maps did not agree, and not one of them signified a coast with anything like the form of the real Great Southern Continent. To the period of fancy succeeded that of patchwork. Came the Dutch, often blown out of their true course from the Cape of Good Hope to the Spice Islands, and stumbling upon the shores of Western Australia. To some such accident we probably owe the piece of improved cartography shown upon Emmerie Mollineux's map, which Hakluyt inserted in some copies of the second edition of his Principal Navigations, and which Shakespeare is supposed to have had in mind when, in a merry scene in Twelfth Night, he made Maria say of Malvolio (3 2 85): "He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the AUGMENTATION OF THE INDIES."* (* See Mr. Charles Coote's paper in Transactions of New Shakespeare Society, 1877 to 1879. He read the phrase "augmentation of the Indies," as referring to this and some other additions to the map of the world, now for the first time shown. In those days, of course, "the Indies" meant pretty well everything out of Europe, including America. It is curious that Flinders called the aboriginals whom he saw in Port Phillip "Indians." Probably all coloured peoples were "Indians" to seamen even so late as his day. There is a fine copy of the map referred to in volume 1 of the 1903 edition of Hakluyt, edited by Professor Walter Raleigh.) This map marks an improvement, in the sense that an approach to the truth, probably founded on actual observation, is an improvement on a large, comprehensive piece of guess work. Emmerie Mollineux expunged the imaginary region, and substituted a small tongue of land, shaped like a thimble.