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If the statements of the last Chapter should have excited surprize, as offering a detailed account from Homer of the Chinese and Tartars, that surprize must be increased by the contents of this volume, which will give a scarcely less detailed account of America, that vast continent, which, if we believe a favourite story, was only discovered about three centuries ago, though it is clearly demonstrable, that it was really much better known to the oldest of the ancients than it is to the moderns.

The least poetical, or least enigmatical repre

sentation that I have met with of that entire Continent, is a statue of about four feet high, which at the sale of the late Lord Mendip's marbles, was sold I believe to Mr. Blundel of Liverpool, and was commonly supposed to be the statue of an Egyptian priest. The only part of the figure which is clothed, are the hips and thighs, at the points corresponding with which (namely, about the isthmus of Darien), the sea has made an inroad upon the continent, and concealed it, as it were, from view. The remarkable attitude of the shoulders, and the general action of the figure, seem to imply that it is resisting a great pressure, which would seem to have relation to the enormous masses of ice on the top of North America ; and the two small portions of rods, which it holds horizontally, one in each hand, denote the line of the tropical circle which comes up to Cape Florida, on the east nearly, and to Cape California on the west; the promontories which terminate in those capes, constituting the hands and arms of the figure. The end of a rod in the massive gigantic hand, which lay lately in the court of the British

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