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I undertake not to make an exact description of Japan, after those which have been made of it by geographers and travellers: by an ordinary view of the charts, and common reading of the relations of the Indies, it is easy to understand, that Japan is situate at the extremity of Asia, over against China; that it is a concourse of islands which compose as it were one body, and that the chiefest of them gives the name to all the rest; that this world of islands, as it is called by a great geographer, is filled with mountains, some of which are inaccessible, and almost above the clouds; that the colds there are excessive, and that the soil, which is fruitful in mines of gold and silver, is not productive of much grain of any sort necessary to life, for want of cultivation.
The supper room of the Savoy Hotel was all brightness and glitter and gayety. But Sir James Willoughby Pitt, baronet, of the United Kingdom, looked round about him through the smoke of his cigarette, and felt moodily that this was a flat world, despite the geographers, and that he was very much alone in it. He felt old.
In the east and the west, throughout that great vague new world, of which geographers had hardly yet made a sketch, which comprised both the Americas and something called the East Indies, and which Spain claimed as her private property, those humbly born and energetic adventurers were rapidly creating a symmetrical system out of most dismal chaos.
I ordered a choice dinner for twelve, paid the earnest money, and made the host promise that everything should be of the best. When I got back to St. Angelo, I had a sackfull of books carried into Clementine's room. She was petrified. There were more than one hundred volumes, poets, historians, geographers, philosophers, scientists nothing was forgotten.
According to him, the mistakes of geographers arise from the vexatious circumstance of all the rivers of Guiana having different names at their mouths and near their sources. He could not expect that La Cruz and Surville, mingling old hypotheses with accurate ideas, would reproduce on their maps the Mar Dorado or Mar Blanco.
The people attested its length by asserting, in true African style, "If you sail along it for months, you will turn without seeing the end of it:" European geographers apparently will not understand that this declaration shows only the ignorance of the natives concerning everything a few miles beyond their homes.
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."
"I have been told that most old nations have to struggle with difficulties that we escape," returned John Effingham, "though I confess this is a superiority on our part, that never before presented itself to my mind." "The political economists, and even the geographers have overlooked it, but practical men see and feel its advantages, every hour in the day.
I suppose the position of the island of Marajo at that time to have corresponded very nearly to the present position of the island of Tupinambaranas, just at the junction of the Madeira with the Amazons. It is a question among geographers whether the Tocantins is a branch of the Amazons, or should be considered as forming an independent river system.
For the physiologist this perfection of the compound microscope had the same significance that the, discovery of America had for the fifteenth-century geographers it promised a veritable world of utterly novel revelations. Nor was the fulfilment of that promise long delayed.
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