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Scarce, however, have they completed their goodly superstructure when in trudges a phalanx of opposite authors with Hans de Laet, the great Dutchman, at their head, and at one blow tumbles the whole fabric about their ears.

Horum enim deorum et species et effectus in aperto mundo atque lucenti præsentes videmus. Vitruv. de Architect. p. 6. de Laet. Antwerp. The death of Cæsar, and the civil wars which ensued, afforded foreign nations some respite from the Roman ambition. Augustus, having restored peace to mankind, seems to have made it a settled maxim of his reign not to extend the Empire.

Popeliniere, De Thou, Wytfleit, D'Aubigne De Laet, Brantome, Lescarbot, Champlain, and other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have told or touched upon the story of the Huguenots in Florida; but they all draw their information from one or more of the sources named above. These include the correspondence of the French and Spanish courts concerning the massacre of the Huguenots.

At Maniquarez we met with some creoles, who had been hunting at Cubagua. Deer of a small breed are so common in this uninhabited islet, that a single individual may kill three or four in a day. I know not by what accident these animals have got thither, for Laet and other chroniclers of these countries, speaking of the foundation of New Cadiz, mention only the great abundance of rabbits.

De Laet, one of the ablest writers of the country in connection with Conscience, has done much for the revival of Flemish literature, which now boasts of many original writers in various departments. The literature of the Netherlands, like the people, is earnest, religious, always simple, and often elevated and sublime.

Laet, who wrote his Orbis Novus in 1633, and who had some excellent notions respecting these coasts, expressly states, that the lagoon was separated from the sea by an isthmus above the level of high water. In 1726, an impetuous hurricane destroyed the salt-works of Araya, and rendered the fort, the construction of which had cost more than a million of piastres, useless.

Now all this exquisite chain of reasoning, which is so strikingly characteristic of the good father, being addressed to the faith, rather than the understanding, is flatly opposed by Hans de Laet, who declares it a real and most ridiculous paradox to suppose that Noah ever entertained the thought of discovering America; and as Hans is a Dutch writer, I am inclined to believe he must have been much better acquainted with the worthy crew of the ark than his competitors, and of course possessed of more accurate sources of information.

We, in England, had the same distinction between 'Laet, or 'villains' settled on the land, glebae adscripti, and mere thralls or theows, slaves pure and simple.

This would prove that these nations learned to know the precious metals among the foreign products which came to them from the Cordilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the Andes. This circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state of geography in those countries. Fray Pedro Simon pages 597 and 608. Harris Coll. volume 2 page 212. Laet page 652. Caulin page 175.

They had no doubt been carried, as a very rare fruit, to the Upper Maranon, and thence, by the Cordilleras, to Quito and Peru. The Novus Orbis of Laet, in which I found the first account of the cow-tree, furnishes also a description and a figure singularly exact of the fruit of the bertholletia.