are those _not alluded to in the French text_, a fact which suggests that
the other, extraneous matter, has been interpolated.

The illustrations, not alluded to in the French text, may, therefore,
have belonged to the prototypic map, such are the representations of
trees, rough guniah-looking dwellings, guanacos, and those strange, huts
on the western coast, which may have been inspired by some freak of
nature as seen by Dampier on the same coast some hundred and thirty odd
years after these charts were painted. Dampier says: "There were several
things like haycocks standing in the Savannah, which at a distance we
thought were houses, looking just like the Hottentots' houses at the Cape
of Good Hope; but we found them to be so many rocks."

Dampier and his companions may have mistaken some anthills for rocks.
Péron the French explorer describes some huge dome-shaped ant-hills seen
on this coast, and Captain Pelsart, wrecked in 1629, also describes some
ant-hills seen by him and his companions when in search of water on this
same coast in latitude 22 degrees south.

In 1818, Allan Cunningham, when on the west coast of Australia, at the
Bay of Rest, took occasion to measure one of these gigantic ant-hills of
that coast. He found it to be eight feet in height, and twenty-six in
girth.

Pelsart's account runs thus: "On the 16th of June, in the morning, they
returned on shore in hopes of getting more water, but were disappointed;
and having no time to observe the country it gave them no great hopes of
better success, even if they had travelled further within land, which
appeared a thirsty, barren plain, covered with ant-hills, so high that
they looked afar off like the huts of negroes..."