take their first gaze into the world, with ready credulity and unlimited
fancy, willing to believe in fairies and demons, Amazons and mystic
islands, "forms of a lower hemisphere," and fountains of perpetual youth.


MEDIAEVAL MAP OF THE WORLD; THE ROMAN DOMINION.

The known world, in the time of Prince Henry of Portugal (at whose
discoveries it will be convenient to take a preliminary glance), was a
very small one indeed. The first thing for us to do is to study our maps
and charts. Without frequent reference to these, a narrative like the
present forms in our mind only a mirage of names and dates and facts, is
wrongly apprehended even while we are regarding it, and soon vanishes
away. The map of the world being before us, let us reduce it to the
proportions it filled in Prince Henry's time; let us look at our infant
world. First take away those two continents, for so we may almost call
them, each much larger than a Europe, to the far west. Then cancel that
square massive looking piece to the extreme south-east; its days of penal
settlements and of golden fortunes are yet to come. Then turn to Africa;
instead of that form of inverted cone which it presents, and which we now
know there are physical reasons for its presenting, make a scimetar shape
of it, by running a slightly curved line from Juba on the eastern side to
Cape Nam on the western. Declare all below that line unknown. Hitherto, we
have only been doing the work of destruction; but now scatter emblems of
hippogriffs and anthropophagi on the outskirts of what is left on the map,
obeying a maxim, not confined to the ancient geographers only: "Where you
know nothing, place terrors." Looking at the map thus completed, we can
hardly help thinking to ourselves, with a smile, what a small space,
comparatively speaking, the known history of the world has been transacted
in, up to the last four hundred years. The idea of the universality of the