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ing more ancient, a long practice has helped us to find out
many conveniences of life, and some happy chances have
discovered other things to us which no man’s understand-
ing could ever have invented.’ ‘As for the antiquity either of
their government or of ours,’ said he, ‘you cannot pass a
true judgment of it unless you had read their histories; for,
if they are to be believed, they had towns among them be-
fore these parts were so much as inhabited; and as for those
discoveries that have been either hit on by chance or made
by ingenious men, these might have happened there as well
as here. I do not deny but we are more ingenious than they
are, but they exceed us much in industry and application.
They knew little concerning us before our arrival among
them. They call us all by a general name of ‘The nations that
lie beyond the equinoctial line;’ for their chronicle men-
tions a shipwreck that was made on their coast twelve
hundred years ago, and that some Romans and Egyptians
that were in the ship, getting safe ashore, spent the rest of
their days amongst them; and such was their ingenuity that
from this single opportunity they drew the advantage of
learning from those unlooked-for guests, and acquired all
the useful arts that were then among the Romans, and
which were known to these shipwrecked men; and by the
hints that they gave them they themselves found out even
some of those arts which they could not fully explain, so
happily did they improve that accident of having some of
our people cast upon their shore. But if such an accident has
at any time brought any from thence into Europe, we have
been so far from improving it that we do not so much as re-

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