possibility that the book
may have given a hint to Swift in the writing of Gulliver's Travels.* (*
See the Cambridge History of English Literature 9 106; where, however,
the English translation is erroneously cited as Journey of Jacques Sadour
to Australia.)

In 1770 and 1771 Alexander Dalrymple published An Historical Collection
of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean. In the preface to
that work he used the word Australia as "comprehending the discoveries at
a distance from America to the eastward."* (* Page 15 of the 1780 edition
of Dalrymple.) He did not intend it to include the present Australia at
all. De Brosses had used the three names Magellanica, Polynesia and
Australasia, which Dalrymple accepted; but he thought there was room for
a fourth for the area east of South America. The part of the Australian
continent known when Dalrymple published his book--only the west and
northern coasts--was included within the division which De Brosses called
Australasia.

Here we have three instances of the use of the word Australia in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but without reference to the
continent which now bears that name.

In 1793, G. Shaw and J.E. Smith published in London a Zoology and Botany
of New Holland. Here the word Australia was used in its modern sense, as
applied to the southern continent. The authors wrote of "the vast island,
or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia, or New Holland, which has
so lately attracted the particular attention of European navigators and
naturalists."

The word was not therefore of Flinders' devising. But it may be taken to
be certain that he was unacquainted with the previous employment of it by
the Dutch indexer, by Foigny's English translator, or by Shaw and Smith.
It is doubtful whether he had observed the previous use of it by
Dalrymple. Undoubtedly he had read that author's book. He may have had
the volumes in his cabin library. But he was so exact and scrupulous a
man that we can say with confidence that, had he remembered the
occurrence of the word in Dalrymple, he would have mentioned the fact.
The point is not material, however, because, as already observed,
Dalrymple did not apply "Australia" to this continent, but to a different
region. The essential point is that "Australia was reinvented by
Flinders."* (* Morris, Dictionary of Austral English page 10.)

Flinders felt the need of a single word that would be a good name for the
is