1.  It may be fairly considered, as one great advantage accruing to the world from our late surveys of the globe, that they have confuted fanciful theories, too likely to give birth to impracticable undertakings.

After Captain Cook’s persevering and fruitless traverses through every corner of the southern hemisphere, who, for the future, will pay any attention to the ingenious reveries of Campbell, de Brosses, and de Buffon? or hope to establish an intercourse with such a continent as Manpertuis’s fruitful imagination had pictured?  A continent equal, at least, in extent, to all the civilized countries in the known northern hemisphere, where new men, new animals, new productions of every kind, might be brought forward to our view, and discoveries be made, which would open inexhaustible treasures of commerce?[48] We can now boldly take it upon us to discourage all expeditions, formed on such reasonings of speculative philosophers, into a quarter of the globe, where our persevering English navigator, instead of this promised fairy land, found nothing but barren rocks, scarcely affording shelter to penguins and seals; and dreary seas, and mountains of ice, occupying the immense space allotted to imaginary paradises, and the only treasures there to be discovered, to reward the toil, and to compensate the dangers, of the unavailing search.

[Footnote 48:  See Maupertuis’s Letter to the King of Prussia.  The author of the Preliminary Discourse to Bougainville’s Voyage aux Isles Malouines, computes that the southern continent (for the existence of which, he owns, we must depend more on the conjectures of philosophers, than on the testimony of voyagers) contains eight or ten millions of square leagues.—­D.]

Or, if we carry our reflections into the northern hemisphere, could Mr Dobbs have made a single convert, much less could he have been the successful solicitor of two different expeditions, and have met with encouragement from the legislature, with regard to his favourite passage through Hudson’s Bay, if Captain Christopher had previously explored its coasts, and if Mr Hearne had walked over the immense continent behind it?  Whether, after Captain Cook’s and Captain Clerke’s discoveries on the west side of America, and their report of the state of Beering’s Strait, there can be sufficient encouragement to make future attempts to penetrate into the Pacific Ocean in any northern direction, is a question, for the decision of which the public will be indebted to this work.

2.  But our voyages will benefit the world, not only by discouraging future unprofitable searches, but also by lessening the dangers and distresses formerly experienced in those seas, which are within the line of commerce and navigation, now actually subsisting.  In how many instances have the mistakes of former navigators, in fixing the true situations of important places, been rectified?  What accession to the variation chart?  How many nautical observations