AND

Ten plates of selected plants from different parts of Terra Australis.

THE READER IS REQUESTED TO CORRECT THE FOLLOWING ERRATA.

[Errors have been corrected in this ebook]



INTRODUCTION.

The voyages which had been made, during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, by Dutch and by English navigators, had successively brought
to light various extensive coasts in the southern hemisphere, which were
thought to be united; and to comprise a land, which must be nearly equal
in magnitude to the whole of Europe. To this land, though known to be
separated from all other great portions of the globe, geographers were
disposed to give the appellation of Continent: but doubts still existed,
of the continuity of its widely extended shores; and it was urged, that,
as our knowledge of some parts was not founded upon well authenticated
information, and we were in total ignorance of some others, these coasts
might, instead of forming one great land, be no other than parts of
different large islands.

The establishment, in 1788, of a British colony on the easternmost, and
last discovered, of these new regions, had added that degree of interest
to the question of their continuity, which a mother country takes in
favour, even, of her outcast children, to know the form, extent, and