ock, Henderson, and by those Englishmen who joined the Spanish
Americans during their struggle with the mother country. From the
observations, enquiries, and researches of these travellers, our
information respecting all those parts of South America which constituted
the Spanish and Portuguese dominions there, especially of Mexico, Terra
Firma, Brazil, and Buenos Ayres, and generally the eastern and middle
portions, has been much extended, as well as rendered more accurate and
particular. Humboldt, especially, has left little to be gleaned by any
future traveller, from any of those countries which he has visited and
described.

The rapid and wonderful increase in the territories and inhabitants of the
United States, has necessarily laid open the greater part of North America
to our acquaintance. The United States, limited in their wish and
endeavours to extend themselves on the north by the British possessions
there, and on the south by the Spanish territories, and moreover drawn
towards the interior and the shores of the Pacific by the grand natural
navigation which the Mississippi and its numerous streams afford for inland
commerce, and by the commercial access to the wealth of the East which the
possession of the shores of the Pacific would open to them, have pushed
their territories towards the west. First, the Alleghany Mountains, a
feeble barrier to an encreasing population, and a most enterprising as well
as unsettled people, were passed; then the Mississippi was reached and
crossed; and at present the government of the United States are preparing
the way for extending their territories gradually to the Western Ocean
itself, and for spreading their population, as they go westwards, to the
north and the south, as far as their limits, will admit.

All those countries, over which they have spread themselves, are of course
now well known, principally from the accounts published by Europeans, and
especially Englishmen, who have been tempted to explore them, or to settle
there. The government of the United States itself has not been backward in
setting on foot exploratory travels into the immense districts to the west
of the Mississippi: to these enterprizes they seem to have been
particularly directed and stimulated by the acquisition of Louisiana from
France, a country "rich and varied in its soil, almost inexhaustible in
natural resources, and almost indefinite in extent."

This acquisition was made in the year 180