. In the age just opening the homely names most dear
to the young republic were to be inscribed on capes, islands, and
promontories, seas, bays, and continents. There was soon to be a "Staten
Island" both in the frozen circles of the northern and of the southern
pole, as well as in that favoured region where now the mighty current of
a worldwide commerce flows through the gates of that great metropolis of
the western world, once called New Amsterdam. Those well-beloved words,
Orange and Nassau, Maurice and William, intermingled with the names of
many an ancient town and village, or with the simple patronymics of hardy
navigators or honoured statesmen, were to make the vernacular of the new
commonwealth a familiar sound in the remotest corners of the earth; while
a fifth continent, discovered by the enterprise of Hollanders, was soon
to be fitly baptized with the name of the fatherland. Posterity has been
neither just nor grateful, and those early names which Dutch genius and
enterprise wrote upon so many prominent points of the earth's surface,
then seen for the first time by European eyes, are no longer known.

The impulse given to the foreign trade of the Netherlands by the
publication of Linschoten's work was destined to be a lasting one.
Meantime this most indefatigable and enterprising voyager--one of those
men who had done nothing in his own estimation so long as aught remained
to do--was deeply pondering the possibility of a shorter road to the
opulent kingdoms of Cathay and of China than the one which the genius of
De Gama had opened to his sovereigns. Geography as a science was
manifesting the highest activity at that period, but was still in a
rudimentary state. To the Hollanders especially much of the progress
already made by it was owing. The maps of the world by Mercator of
Leyden, published on a large scale, together with many astronomical and
geographical charts, delineations of exploration, and other scientific
works, at the magnificent printing establishment of William Blaeuw, in
Amsterdam, the friend and pupil of Tycho Brahe, and the first in that
line of typographers who made the name famous, constituted an epoch in
cosmography. Another ardent student of geography lived in Amsterdam,
Peter Plancius by name, a Calvinist preacher, and one of the most zealous
and intolerant of his cloth. In an age and a country which had not yet
thoroughly learned the lesson taught by hundreds of thousands of murders
comm