It is, however, a piece of justice due to the memory of these great men,
to acknowledge that we are equally encouraged by their examples and
guided by their discoveries. We owe to them the being freed, not only
from the errors, but from the doubts and difficulties with which former
ages were oppressed; to them we stand indebted for the discovery of the
best part of the world, which was entirely unknown to the ancients,
particularly some part of the eastern, most of the southern, and all the
western hemisphere; from them we have learned that the earth is
surrounded by the ocean, and that all the countries under the torrid zone
are inhabited, and that, quite contrary to the notions that were formerly
entertained, they are very far from being the most sultry climate in the
world, those within a few degrees of the tropics, though habitable, being
much more hot, for reasons which have been elsewhere explained. By their
voyages, and especially by the observations of Columbus, we have been
taught the general motion of the sea, the reason of it, and the cause and
difference of currents in particular places, to which we may add the
doctrine of tides, which were very imperfectly known, even by the
greatest men in former times, whose accounts have been found equally
repugnant to reason and experience.

By their observations we have acquired a great knowledge as to the nature
and variation of winds, particularly the monsoons, or trade winds, and
other periodical winds, of which the ancients had not the least
conception; and by these helps we not only have it in our power to
proceed much farther in our discoveries, but we are likewise delivered
from a multitude of groundless apprehensions, that frightened them from
prosecuting discoveries. We give no credit now to the fables that not
only amused antiquity, but even obtained credit within a few generations.
The authority of Pliny will not persuade us that there are any nations
without heads, whose eyes and mouths are in their breasts, or that the