undertake distant voyages, or to attempt remote discoveries.

Lucretius enumerating the various arts, that were brought to the perfection they had attained in his time, by the observation of successive artists, improving upon new hints and augmenting experience, begins first with this important science:

Navigia, atque agriculturas, moenia, leges,
Arma, vias, vestes, et cætera de genere horum,
Præmia, delicias quoque vitæ funditus omneis,
Carmina, picturas, et dædala signa polire,
Usus, et impigræ simul experientia mentis
Paulatim docuit pedetentim progredientis.
Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit ætas
In medium ratioque in luminis eruit oras.
Namque aliud ex alio clarescere corde videbant
Artibus, ad summum donec venêre cacumen.

Thus ships, thus clothes, thus wine, and oil began ;
And towns, the comfort and support of man;
But bettered, all to due perfection brought,
By searching wits, from long experience taught.
Thus time, and thus sagacious men produce
A thousand things or for delight or use;
For one thing known does vigorous light impart
For further search, and leads to height of art.

CREECH.

There will ever be speculators, fond to conjecture concerning the origin of things, however remote in time, and enveloped in obscurity. Various, in course, have been the conjectures concerning navigation; conjectures, which however unsatisfactory, are yet so far interesting, as they furnish some pleasing scope for ingenious, as well as fanciful reflections. Among the ancients, the poets refer the invention of the art of navigation to Neptune; others to Bacchus, others to Hercules, others to Jason, and others to Janus, who is said to have constructed the first ship. Historians ascribe it to the Egenites, the Phenicians, and the ancient inhabitants of Britain. Some will

have it, that the first hint was taken from the flight of the kite; others from the motion of fishes in general; and others, from that of the nautilus, a curious shell-fish, in particular; while a learned editor of Virgil's Georgics believes, that an alder-tree, grown hollow with age, and falling into the river on which it was planted (for this tree delights in a moist soil and the banks of rivers) gave the first hint toward navigation:

Tunc alnos primum fluvii sensêre cavatas :

Then first the rivers hollowed alders bore.

And thus Dryden has poetically delivered his sentiments on the subject:

By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid, Art,
Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow:
The fishes first to shipping did impart,

Their tail the rudder, and their head the prow.

Some log perhaps upon the waters swam,

An useless drift, which rudely cut within,
And hollowed first, a floating trough became,
And cross some rivulet passage did begin.

In shipping such as this, the Irish kern,

And untaught Indians on the stream did glide:
Ere sharp-keeled boats to stem the flood did learn,
Or fin-like oars did spread from either side.

Add but a sail, and Saturn so appeared,
When from lost empire he an exile went,
And with the golden age to Tyber steered,
Where coin and commerce first he did invent.

Rude as their ships was navigation then ;
No useful compass or meridian known;
Coasting, they kept the land within their ken,

And knew the north but when the polestar shone.

Scripture refers the origin of so useful an invention to God himself, who gave the first specimen in

the ark built by Noah: for the raillery which that good patriarch underwent on account of his enterprise, is a sufficient demonstration, that the world was then ignorant of any thing like navigation, and that they even thought it impossible.

But whatever be the origin of this art, and whatever nation may claim the honour of inventing it, or of having rendered it subservient to the noble advantages of commerce, it is certain, that, among all the nations of antiquity, the structure of their vessels was extremely rude, and their method of working them no less defective. They were unacquainted with some of the great principles and operations of navigation, which are now considered as the first elements on which that science is founded. Though that property of the magnet, by which it attracts iron, was well known to the ancients, its most amazing and important virtue of pointing to the poles had escaped their observation. Destitute of this faithful guide, which now conducts the pilot with so much certainty in the unbounded ocean, during the darkness of the night, and when the heavens are covered with clouds, the ancients had no other method of regulating their course, than by observing the sun and stars. Their navigation was, in course, uncertain and timid. They durst seldom quit sight of land, but crept along the coast, exposed to all the dangers, and retarded by all the obstructions, unavoidable in holding such an awkward course. incredible length of time was requisite for performing voyages, which are now finished in a short space. Even in the mildest climates, and in seas the least tempestuous, it was only during the summer months that the ancients ventured out of their harbour. The remainder of the year was lost in inactivity. It would have been deemed most inconsiderate rashness to brave the fury of the winds and waves during the winter.

An

Those who have written more diffusively upon the subject, have taken a survey of the progress of discovery and navigation among the ancients; beginning with the Egyptians, and proceeding successively with the Phenicians, Jews, Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans. From this survey, which may be traced from the earliest dawn of historical knowledge to the full establishment of the Roman empire, the progress of the ancients appears to have been wonderfully slow. It seems neither adequate to what we might have expected from the activity and enterprise of the human mind, nor to what might have been performed by the powers of the great empires, that successively governed the world. If we reject accounts that are fabulous and obscure; if we adhere steadily to the light and information of authentic history, without substituting in its place the conjectures of fancy, or the dreams of etymologists, we must conclude, that the knowledge which the ancients had acquired of the habitable globe was extremely confined. This would sufficiently appear from a review of such parts of the world as they had never explored. But there is a yet more decisive proof of this, in an opinion which universally prevailed among them, that the earth was divided into five regions, which they distinguished by the name of zones. Two of these, the nearest to the poles, they termed frigid zones; and they believed that the extreme cold which reigned perpetually there, rendered them uninhabitable. Another, seated under the line, and extending on either side toward the tropics, they called the torrid zoue; and they imagined it to be so burnt up with unremitting heat, as to be equally destitute of inhabitants. On the other two zones, which occupied the remainder of the earth, they bestowed the appellation of temperate; and they taught that these, being the only regions in which life could subsist, were allotted to man for

his habitation. This wild opinion was not a conceit of the uninformed vulgar, or a fanciful fiction of the poets, but a system adopted by the most enlightened philosophers, the most accurate historians and geographers, in Greece and Rome. According to this theory, a vast portion of the habitable globe was pronounced to be unfit for sustaining the human species. Those fertile and populous regions within the torrid zone, which are now known not only to yield their own inhabitants the necessaries and comforts of life, with most luxuriant profusion, but to communicate their superfluous stores to the rest of the world, were supposed to be the seat of perpetual sterility and desolation. As all the parts of the globe which the ancients had discovered lay within the northern temperate zone, their opinion that the other temperate zone was inhabited was founded not on discovery, but on reasoning and conjecture. They even believed that, by the insufferable heat of the torrid zone, such an insuperable barrier was placed between the two temperate zones, as would prevent for ever any intercourse between them.

Nevertheless, the discoveries of the Greeks and Romans were still very considerable, when compared to those of remoter times; and, in the second century of the christian era, geography, enriched by new observations, made a very conspicuous figure, under the auspices of Ptolemy the philosopher. The discoveries, subsequent to these times, would lead me into a field of discussion too extensive for this number; which I shall conclude, therefore, with some very ingenious and interesting reflections on the present wonderful perfection of navigation, from Dr. Reinhold Foster's History of the Voyages and Discoveries made in the North, translated from the German.

Of all the arts and professions which have at any time attracted my notice, none has ever appeared to