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ance between the American people and the foreign nation, coming by the winds of the north from a rich and industrious country. I have carefully examined the four drawings of the celebrated stone of Taunton River, which M. Loet published in England in the Memoirs of the Antiquarian Society." (Archæologia, vol. viii., p. 296.) "Far from recognizing a symmetrical arrangement of simple letters and syllabic characters, I discover a drawing scarcely traced, like those that have been found on the rocks of Norway, and in almost all the countries inhabited by the Scandinavian nations.” (Suhm, Samlinger til ten Danske Historic, b. ii., p. 215.) "In the sketch we distinguish, from the form of the heads, five human figures surrounding an animal with horns, much higher in the fore than in the hind part of the body.” Humboldt's Researches in America, vol. i., p. 153.

No. V.

"The great and splendid work of Marco Polo (Il Milione di Messer Marco Polo), as we see in the corrected edition of Count Baldelli, is wrongly called a book of travels: it is chiefly a descriptive, and, we may add, a statistical work, in which it is difficult to distinguish what the traveler himself saw and what he derived from others, or gathered from the topographical descriptions which are so plenty in Chinese literature, and which he had an opportunity of attaining through his Persian interpreter. The striking similarity of the report of the travels of Hinan-tschang, the Buddhist pilgrim of the seventh century, with that of Marco Polo, of the Pamir Highlands, in 1277, early attracted my attention. . . . . However much the more recent travelers have been inclined to enter into an account of their own personal adventures, Marco Polo, on the other hand, endeavors to mix up his own observations with the official accounts communicated to him, which were probably numerous, as he held the post of governor of the town of Zangui. The plan of compiling adopted by the famous traveler renders it intelligible how he was able to dictate his book to his fellow-prisoner and friend, Messer Rustigielo, of Pisa, from the documents before him, while in prison in Genoa in 1295."-Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii., p. 400.

Humboldt elsewhere says, that "it has frequently been supposed, and declared with remarkable decision, that the truthful Marco Polo had a great influence upon Columbus, and even that he was in possession of a copy of Marco Polo's work upon his first voyage of discovery." -Navarrete, Collecion de los Viajos y Descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Españoles, vol. i., p. 261.

Marco Polo is called by Malte Brun "the creator of modern Oriental geography—the Humboldt of the thirteenth century.”

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The work of Marco Polo is stated by some to have been originally written in Latin, though the most probable opinion is that it was written in Italian. Copies of it in manuscript were multiplied, and rapidly circulated; translations were made into various languages, until the

invention of printing enabled it to be widely diffused throughout Europe. In the course of these translations and successive editions, the original text, according to Purchas, has been much vitiated, and it is probable many extravagances in numbers and measurements with which Marco Polo is charged may be the errors of translators and printers. Francis Pepin, author of the Brandenburgh version, styles Polo a man commendable for his devoutness, prudence, and fidelity. Athanasius Kircher, in his account of China, says that none of the ancients have described the kingdoms of the remote parts of the East with more exactness. Various other learned men have borne testimony to his character, and most of the substantial points of his work have been authenticated by subsequent travelers. It is manifest, however, that he dealt much in exaggeration. The historical part of his work is full of errors and fables. He confuses the names of places, is very inexact as to distances, and gives no latitude of the places he visited.”—Washington Irving's Columbus, vol. iv., p. 294.

Marco Polo returned from Tartary to his native city, Venice, in 1295, having pursued his mercantile peregrinations in Asia upward of twenty-six vears.

No. VI.

"Sir John Mandeville was born in the town of St. Alban's. He was devoted to study from his earliest childhood, and, after finishing his general education, applied himself to medicine. He left England in 1332, and, according to his own account, visited Turkey, Armenia, Egypt, Upper and Lower Libya, Syria, Persia, Chaldea, Ethiopia, Tartary, Amazonia, and the Indies, residing in their principal cities. He wrote a history of his travels in three languages, English, French, and Latin. The descriptions given by Mandeville of the Grand Khan, of the province of Cathay, and the city of Cambalee, are scarcely less extravagant than those of Marco Polo. The royal palace was more than two leagues in circumference; the grand hall had twenty-four columns of copper and gold; there were more than 300,000 men occupied, and living in and about the palace, of which more than 100,000 were employed in taking care of the elephants, of which there were 10,000, &c., &c.

"Mandeville has become proverbial for indulging in a traveler's exaggerations; yet his accounts of the countries which he visited have been found far more veracious than had been imagined. His descrip tions of Cathay and the wealthy province of Mangi, agreeing with those of Marco Polo, had great authority with Columbus."-Washington Irving's Columbus, vol. iv., p. 308.

No. VII.

"The Western nations, the Greeks, and the Romans, knew that magnetism could be communicated for a length of time to iron ('sola hæc materia ferri vires à magneti lapide accipit, retinetque longo tempore.'-Plin., xxxiv., 14). The great discovery of the terrestrial directive force, therefore, depended alone on this, that no one in the West happened to observe that a longish piece of magnetic iron ore, or a magnetized iron rod, floated at liberty upon water by means of a piece of wood, or balanced and suspended freely in the air by means of a thread. But a thousand years and more before the commencement of our era, in the dark epoch of Codru, and the return of the Heraclidæ to the Peloponnesus, the Chinese had already magnetic cars, upon which the movable arm of a human figure pointed invariably to the south, as a means of finding the way through the boundless grassy plains of Tartary. In the third century, indeed, of the Christian era, at least 700 years, therefore, before the introduction of the ship's compass upon European seas, Chinese craft were sailing the Indian Ocean under the guidance of magnetic southern indication. This early knowledge and application of the magnetic needle gave the Chinese geographers great advantages over those of early Greece and Rome, to whom, for example, the true course of the Apennines and Pyrenees was never known. Magnetism is one of the numerous forms in which electricity manifests itself. The ancient suspicion of the identity of electrical and magnetical attraction has been demonstrated in the present age. 'If electrum (amber),' says Pliny, in the sense of the Ionic natural philosophy of Thales, 'becomes inspired by friction and warmth, it attracts bark and dried leaves, exactly like the magnetic iron stone.'* The same words occur in the discourse laudatory of the magnet of the Chinese natural philosopher Kuopho, who lived in the fourth century. It was not without surprise that I myself observed, among the children at play on the woody banks of the Orinoco, the offspring of native tribes in the lowest grade of civilization, that the excitement of electricity by friction was known. The boys rubbed the dry, flat, and shining seeds of a creeping leguminous plant (probably a negretia) until they attracted fibers of cotton wool and chips of the bamboo. This amusement of these coppery children is calculated to leave a deep and solemn impression behind it. What a chasm lies between the electrical play of these savages and the discovery of the lightning conductor, of the chemically decompounding pile, of the light-evoking mechanical apparatus! In such gulfs, millenniums in the history of the intellectual progress of mankind lie buried."-Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. i., p. 180;

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* Plin., lib. xxxvii., p. 3; Plato, in Timao, p. 80; Martin, Etudes sur le Timée, tom. ii., p. 343-346; Strabo, lib. xv., p. 703, Casaub.; Clemens Alex., Strom., ii., p. 370. When Thales, in Aristot., De Animá, lib. i., p. 2, and Hippias, in Diag. Laertio, lib. i., p. 24, attribute a soul to the magnet and to amber, this animation only refers to a moving principle.

Klaproth, Lettre à M. A. de Humboldt, sur l'Invention de la Boussole, p. 125. 1834.

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"The application of the magnetic needle's direction toward the north and south, that is, the use of the mariner's compass in Europe, is probably due to the Arabs, who have to thank the Chinese for their knowledge of it. The Arabic words 'Zohron' and 'Aphron,' meaning north and south, like the numerous Arabic names of the stars in use at the present day, testify the route through which the West became acquainted with it. In European Christendom, the use of the magnetic needle is spoken of as something well known, first in a political and satirical poem, entitled 'La Bible,' written by Guyot of Provence in 1190, and in the description of Palestine, by Jacob of Vitry, bishop of Ptolemais, between the years 1204 and 1215. Also Dante (Paradiso, xii., 29) mentions in a simile the needle (ajo) 'which points southward.' discovery of the mariner's compass was for a long time attributed to Flavius Gioja: he probably made some improvements in the apparatus for managing it in 1302. A much earlier employment of the compass in the European seas is seen in a naval work by Raymundus Lullus of Majorca, a wonderfully talented and scientific man. In his book, entitled 'Fenix de las Maravillas del Orbe,' published in 1286, Lullus says that the mariners of his times made use of the magnetic needle. Navarrete, in his 'Discurso Historico sobre los Progressos del Arte de Navegar en Espana,' p. 28, 1802, records a remarkable passage in the Leyes de las Partidas of the middle of the thirteenth century: 'The needle which guides the mariner in the dark night, and shows him in good and bad weather the direction which he must take, is the mediatrix (medianera) between the magnetic stone (la piedra) and the north star."-Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii., p. 291, 462.

No. VIII.

"In the fifteenth century almost all the mercantile nations sought for slaves at the Canary Islands, as we seek them at present on the coast of Guinea. Every individual made prisoner before he received the rite of baptism was a slave. At this period no attempt had yet been made to prove that the blacks were an intermediary race between men and animals. The swarthy Guanche and the African negro were sold simultaneously in the market of Seville, without a question whether slavery ought to weigh only on men with a black skin and frizzled hair. The archipelago of the Canaries was divided into several small states hostile to each other. The trading nations kept up intestine warfare one Guanche then became the property of another, who sold him to the Europeans; several, who preferred death to slavery, killed themselves and their children. What remained of the Guanches perished mostly in 1494, in the terrible pestilence called the modorra, which was attributed to the quantity of dead bodies left exposed to the air by the Spaniards after the battle of La Laguna. The nation of the Guanches

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was therefore extinct at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is very certain that no native of pure race exists in the whole island; and some travelers, who may otherwise be relied upon, are mistaken when they assert that their guides to the Peak were some of those slender and nimble-footed Guanches. (It is asserted that they could seize the rabbit or wild goat in its course.) It is true that a few Canarian families boast of their relationship to the last shepherd king of Guimar; but these pretensions do not rest on very solid foundations, and are renewed from time to time, when some Canarian of a more dusky hue than his countrymen is prompted to solicit a commission in the service of the King of Spain.

“The Guanches, famed for their tall stature, were the Patagonians of the Old World. I never saw Guanche mummies but in the cabinets of Europe. A considerable number, however, might be found, if miners were employed to open the sepulchral caverns which are cut in the rock on the eastern slope of the Peak. These mummies are in a state of desiccation so singular, that whole bodies, with their integuments, frequently do not weigh above six or seven pounds, or a third less than the skeleton of an individual of the same size recently stripped of the muscular flesh. The conformation of the skull has some slight resemblance to that of the white race of the ancient Egyptians. . . . The only monument that can throw some light on the origin of the Guanches is their language; but, unhappily, there are not above 150 words remaining. It has long been imagined that the language of the Guanches had no analogy with the living tongues; but since the travels of Hornemann, and the ingenious researches of Marsden and Venturi, have drawn the attention of the learned to the Berbers, who, like the Sarmatic tribes, occupy an immense extent of country in the north of Africa, we find that several Guanche words have common roots with words of the Chilha and Gebali dialects. This is at least an indication of the ancient connection between the Guanches and Berbers, a tribe of mountaineers, in which the Numidians, the Getuli, and the Garamanti are confounded, and who extend themselves from the eastern extremity of Atlas by Harutsch and Fezzan, as far as the Oasis of Siwah and Angela. The description which Scylax gives in his 'Periplus' of the inhabitants of Cerne, a shepherd people of a tall stature and long hair, reminds us of the features which characterize the Canary Guanches. The people who succeeded the Guanches descended from the Spaniards, and in a less degree from the Normans. Though these two races have been exposed during three centuries past to the same climate, the latter is distinguished by a whiter skin. The descendants of the Normans inhabit the Valley of the Teganana. The names of Grandville and Dampierre are still pretty common in this district. The whole archipelago does not contain 160,000 inhabitants, and the Islennos are perhaps more numerous in the Spanish settlements of America than in their own country."-Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. i., p. 280.

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