;" and later, when men knew more about these lands, these names,
changed a little, remained as the names of the great continents,
Europe and Asia.

_Africa_, too, is an old name, though not so old as these. We think
of Africa now as a "dark continent," the greater part of which has
only lately become known to white men, and with a native population of
negroes. But for hundreds of years the north of Africa was one of the
most civilized parts of the Roman Empire. Before that time part of it
had belonged to the Carthaginians, whom the Romans conquered. _Africa_
was a Carthaginian name, and was first used by the Romans as the name
of the district round Carthage, and in time it came to be the name of
the whole continent.

_America_ got its name in quite a different way. It was not until the
fifteenth century that this great continent was discovered, and then
it took its name, not from the brave Spaniard, Christopher Columbus,
who first sailed across the "Sea of Darkness" to find it, but from
Amerigo Vespucci, the man who first landed on the mainland.

_Australia_ got its name, which means "land of the south," from
Portuguese and Spanish sailors, who reached its western coasts early
in the sixteenth century. They never went inland, or made any
settlements, but in the queer, inaccurate maps which early geographers
made, they put down a _Terra Australis_, or "southern land," and
later, when Englishmen did at last explore and colonize the continent,
they kept this name _Australia_. This Latin name reminds us of the
fact that Latin was in the Middle Ages the language used by all
scholars in their writings, and names on maps were written in Latin
too, and so a great modern continent like Australia came to have an
old Latin name.

There is a great deal of history in the names of countries. Take the
names of the countries of Europe. _England_ is the land of the
_Angles_, and from this we learn that the Angles were the chief people
of all the tribes who came over and settled in Britain after the
Romans left it. They spread farthest over the land, and gave their
name to it; just as the _Franks_, another of these Northern peoples,
gave their name to France, and the _Belgae_ gave theirs to _Belgium_.
The older name of _Britain_ did not die out, but it was seldom used.
It has really been used much more in modern times than it ever was in
the Middle Ages. It is used especially in poetry or in fine writing,
just as _Briton_ is instead