burning sands and climate, uninhabitable, or inhabited
by inhospitable and barbarous tribes, held out little expectation that
another century would add much to our knowledge of that quarter of the
world; and though the perseverance and enterprise of the eighteenth
century, and what has passed of the nineteenth, have done more than might
reasonably have been anticipated, yet, comparatively speaking, how little
do we yet know of Africa! America held out the most promising as well as
extensive views to future discovery; the form and direction of her
north-west coast was to be traced. In South America, the Spaniards had
already gained a considerable knowledge of the countries lying between the
Atlantic and the Pacific, but in North America, the British colonists had
penetrated to a very short distance from the shores on which they were
first settled; and from their most western habitations to the Pacific, the
country was almost entirely unknown.

The immense extent of the Pacific Ocean, which presented to navigators at
the beginning of the eighteenth century but few islands, seemed to promise
a more abundant harvest to repeated and more minute examination, and this
promise has been fulfilled. New Holland, however, was the only portion of
the world of great extent which could be said to be almost entirely unknown
at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and the completion of our
knowledge of its form and extent may justly be regarded as one of the
greatest and most important occurrences to geography contributed by the
eighteenth century.

The truth and justice of these observations will, we trust, convince our
readers, that, in determining to be more general and concise in what
remains of the geographical portion of our works, we shall not be
destroying its consistency or altering the nature of its plan, but in fact
preserving both; for its great object and design was to trace geographical
knowledge from its infancy till it had reached that maturity and vigour, by
which, in connection with the corresponding increased civilization, general
information and commerce of the world, it was able to advance with rapid
strides, and no longer confining itself to geography, strictly so called,
to embrace the natural history of those countries, the existence, extent,
and form of which it had first ascertained.

The great object and design of the commercial part of this work was
similar; to trace the progress of commercial enterprise