Discovery does not necessarily issue in colonization. The more or less mythical discoveries of the coasts of North America and Australia in the ninth and sixteenth centuries interest the antiquarian rather than the historian. They resemble the so-called anticipations of scientific discoveries--Cesalpino’s, of Harvey; Vico’s, of Wolf and Niebuhr; Swedenborg’s, of Kant; and a host of guessers, of Darwin. As proof alone is discovery in science, so only exploration is discovery in geography. For lack of this essential element even well-certified discoveries are apt to be fruitless. Tasman’s frightened glimpse of New Zealand and his more careful coasting of Tasmania left durable marks on both countries, but only in nomenclature. They led to nothing. No Dutch settlement seems ever to have been made south of New Guinea; no northern nationality is more conspicuously absent among the colonizers of the South Seas. The earlier Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was regarded as that of a halfway house to a more distant goal; they stopped to recruit, then hurried off to rich Cathay. The French left their names to a dozen headlands and rivers on the coast of Western Australia, but, though they often excited the suspicions of New South Wales, they made no attempt to settle. Discovery, to assure sovereignty over the discovered country, must be followed, among animals as among men, by effective occupation. The Portuguese were roused into warlike excitement a few years ago by the advance of the Chartered Company into Mashonaland, where their settlements had long ceased to exist. Their claims to the basin of the Congo were on the same ground equally disregarded--this time by all the powers. A bit of seacoast can more easily be kept, and Delagoa Bay was assured to them by the French arbitrator. Mere occupation has at various times given a valid right to a territory. The Puritans found several islands off the New England coast to be destitute of inhabitants, and the shores so thinned of Indians by an epidemic as to be practically uninhabited. Yet they were careful to assure their title by purchase. The Manowolko Islands of the Malay Archipelago were without indigenes when the first settlers arrived. Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands were found by the mutineers of the Bounty and the convicts from New South Wales to answer to Defoe’s notion of a desert island. The first English settlers in Australia and the first French settlers in New Caledonia met with no resistance from the blacks at the initial stages of occupation. When the Boers trekked across the Vaal they entered on a country that had been left, through exterminating native wars, to the beasts of the field and the forest. The situation is very different when a rival civilized power lays claims to the territory. When Great Britain forcibly took possession of West Griqualand in 1871 she had to salve, without satisfying, the claims of the Orange