Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.

Every place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous. Once beyond the bounds of the city walls, and none knows what may happen. We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are in the open air.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.