The great object of Columbus, in most of his voyages, was to discover a western passage to India. He navigated the Gulf of Mexico with particular attention to this object, and was much disappointed in not finding a pass into the South Sea. The view he is here supposed to have of that ocean would therefore naturally recall his former desire of sailing to India. ↩
The straits of Magellan, so called from having been discovered by a Portuguese navigator of that name, who first attempted to sail round the world, and lost his life in the attempt. ↩
Colonel Palfrey of Boston was an officer of distinction in the American army during the war of independence. Soon after the war he proposed to visit Europe and embarked for England; but never more was heard of. The ship probably perished in the ice. His daughter, here alluded to, is now the wife of William Lee, American consul at Bordeaux. ↩
The color of animals is acquired partly from the food they eat through successive generations and partly from the objects with which they are usually surrounded. Dr. Darwin has a curious note on this subject, in which he remarks on the advantages that insects and other small animals derive from their color, as a means of rendering them invisible to their more powerful enemies, who thus find it difficult to distinguish them from other objects where they reside. Some animals which inhabit cold countries turn white in winter when the earth is covered with snow, such as the snowbird of the Alps. Others in snowy regions are habitually white, such as the white bear of Russia. ↩
Paria is a fertile country near the river Orinoco; the only part of the continent of America that Columbus had seen. Tombut in the same latitude is the most sterile part of Africa. America embraces a greater compass of latitude by many degrees than the other continent; and yet its inhabitants present a much less variety in their physical and moral character. When shall we be able to account for this fact? ↩
Without entering into any discussion on the theory of heat and cold (a point not yet settled in our academies) I would just observe, in vindication of the expression in the text, that some solid matter, such for instance as the surface of the earth, seems absolutely necessary to the production of heat. At least it must be a matter more compact than that of the sun’s rays; and perhaps its power of producing heat is in proportion to its solidity.
The warmth communicated to the atmosphere is doubtless produced by the combined causes of the earth and the sun; but the agency of the former is probably more powerful in this operation than that of the latter, and its presence more indispensable. For masses of matter will produce heat by friction, without the aid of the sun; but no experiment has yet proved that the rays of the sun are capable of producing heat without the aid of other and more solid matter. The air is temperate in those cavities of the earth where the sun is the most effectually excluded; whereas the coldest regions yet known to us are the tops of the Andes, where the sun’s rays have the most direct operation, being the most vertical and the least obstructed by vapors. Those regions are deprived of heat by being so far removed from the broad surface of the earth; a body that appears requisite to warm the surrounding atmosphere by its cooperation with the action of the sun.
From these principles we may conclude that cultivation, in a woody country, tends to warm the atmosphere and ameliorate a cold climate; as by removing the forests and marshes, it opens the earth to the sun, and allows them to act in conjunction upon the air.
According to the descriptions given of the middle parts of Europe by Caesar and Tacitus, it appears that those countries were much colder in their days than they are at present; cultivation seems to have softened that climate to a great degree. The same effect begins to be perceived in North America. Possibly it may in time become as apparent as the present difference in the temperature of the two continents. ↩
The complexion of the inhabitants of North America, who are descended from the English and Dutch, is evidently darker, and their stature taller than those of the English and Dutch in Europe. ↩
We may reckon three stages of improvement in the graphic art or the art of communicating our thoughts to absent persons and to posterity by visible signs. First, The invention of painting ideas, or representing actions, dates and other circumstances of historical fact, by the images of material things, drawn usually on a flat surface or sometimes carved or moulded in a more solid form. This was the state at which the art had arrived in Egypt before the introduction of letters, and in Mexico before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Greeks in Egypt called it hieroglyphic.
Second, The invention of painting sounds, which we do by the use of letters or the alphabet, and which we call writing. This was a vast improvement; as it simplified in a wonderful degree the communication of thought. For ideas are infinite in number and variety; while the simple sounds we use to convey them to the ear are few, distinct and easy to be understood. It would indeed be impossible to express all our ideas by distinct and visible images. And even if the writer were able to do this, not many readers could be made to understand him; since it would be necessary that every new idea should have a new image invented and agreed upon between the writer and the reader, before it could be used: which preliminary could
