circumnavigated. Before this process began, there was a dialectical
stage, when it was hotly contested whether there could possibly be upon
the globe lands antipodean to Europe; and both earlier and later there
were conjectural stages when makers of maps, having no certain data, but
feeling sure that the blank southern hemisphere ought to be filled up
somehow, exercised a vagrant fancy and satisfied a long-felt want by
decorating their drawings with representations of a Terra Incognita
having not even a casual resemblance to the reality.

The process presents few points of resemblance to that by which the
discovery of America was accomplished. Almost as soon as Europe came into
touch with the western hemisphere, discovery was pursued with unflagging
energy, until its whole extent and contour were substantially known.
Within fifty years after Columbus led the way across the Atlantic (1492),
North and South America were laid down with something approaching
precision; and Gerard Mercator's map of 1541 presented the greater part
of the continent with the name fairly inscribed upon it. There were, it
is true, some errors and some gaps, especially on the west coast, which
left work for navigators to do. But the essential point is that in less
than half a century Europe had practically comprehended America as an
addition to the known world. There was but a brief twilight interval
between nescience and knowledge. How different was the case with
Australia! Three hundred years after the date of Columbus' first voyage,
the mere outline of this continent had not been wholly mapped.

During the middle ages, when ingenious men exercised infinite subtlety in
speculation, and wrote large Latin folios to prove each other wrong in
matters about which neither party knew anything at all, there was much
dissertation about the possibility of antipodes. Bishops and saints waxed
eloquent upon the theme. The difficulty of conceiving of lands where
people walked about with their heads hanging downwards, and their feet
exactly opposite to those of Europeans, was too much for some of the
scribes who debated "about it and about." The Greek, Cosmas
Indicopleustes, denounced the "old wives' fable of Antipodes," and asked
how rain could be said to "fall," as in the Scriptures, in regions where
it would have to "come up"* (* The Christian Topography of Cosmas,
translated by J.W. McCrindle, page 17 (Hakluyt Society).) Some would have
it that a belief in