_Examen critique_, tom. i. p. 71. The complete
original texts of the reports of both monks, with learned
notes, may be found in the _Recueil de Voyages et de Memoires,
publie par la Societe de Geographie_, Paris, 1839, tom. iv.,
viz.: _Johannis de Plano Carpini Historia Mongolorum quos nos
Tartaros appellamus_, ed. M. d'Avezac; _Itinerarium Willelmi de
Rubruk_, ed. F. Michel et T. Wright.]

[Footnote 327: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. xxxix.; Ptolemy, i.
17. Cf. Bunbury's _History of Ancient Geography_, London, 1883,
vol. ii. p. 606.]

[Sidenote: The data were thus prepared for Columbus;]

[Sidenote: but as yet nobody reasoned from these data to a practical
conclusion.]

Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the Discovery of
America. Here from the camp of bustling heathen at Karakorum there is
brought to Europe the first announcement of a geographical fact from
which the poetic mind of Christopher Columbus will hereafter reap a
wonderful harvest. This is one among many instances of the way in which,
throughout all departments of human thought and action, the glorious
thirteenth century was beginning to give shape to the problems of which
the happy solution has since made the modern world so different from the
ancient.[328] Since there is an ocean east of Cathay and an ocean west
of Spain, how natural the inference--and albeit quite wrong, how
amazingly fruitful--that these oceans are one and the same, so that by
sailing westward from Spain one might go straight to Cathay! The data
for such an inference were now all at hand, but it does not appear that
any one as yet reasoned from the data to the conclusion, although we
find Roger Bacon, in 1267, citing the opinions of Aristotle and other
ancient writers to the effect that the distance by sea from the western
shores of Spain to the eastern shores of Asia cannot be so very
great.[329] In those days it took a long time for such ideas to get from
the heads of philosophers into the heads of men of action; and in the
thirteenth century, when Cathay was more accessible by land than at any
time before or since, there was no practical necessity felt for a water
route thither. Europe still turned her back upon the Atlantic and gazed
more intently than ever upon Asia. Stronger and more general grew the
interest in Cathay.

[Footnote 328: See my _Beginnings of New England_,