If you have grown up in the country, you know what exploration is. You know how eager one is to see what is around the bend of the road. You have felt the mystery that surrounds a tree-fringed brook, and have wanted to follow it up to the place where it trickles from among the rocks or down to the point where it sweeps out into the river. You have probably been all the better pleased if you had to break your way through the underbrush. It is exhilarating to imagine that your foot is the first that has ever followed the course of this stream. If you have had to clamber up a steep and rocky ledge past a waterfall, you have glowed with pride as you told about the peril of the ascent and the splash and leap of the water.

This desire to explore the world men have felt from the beginning. For ages, however, it was held in check by fear. People pictured the unknown as occupied by savage tribes or monsters, which made them quite content to stay at home. Before the age of Columbus, sailors thought the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the regions of the equator boiled. Men thought that much of Africa was a Sahara Desert. It was only when an unusually venturesome mariner went as far south as Cape Verde and found the vegetation green that this belief began to be dissipated. The age of Columbus was a thrilling one, for every few years some marvelous discovery was made. Columbus proved that one could sail straight west to land. Vasco de Gama sailed around the south of Africa to India. Magellan sailed all the way around the world at least, his ship did. He was killed in the Philippines, but one of his

vessels returned to Spain to bear witness to the adventures of the voyage. In that age so many marvels were reported that hardly anything was too wonderful to be believed.

Of course there were other motives for these explorations than the desire to find what the world contained. One of the strongest was the hope of finding a new way to India. The spices and silks and curious luxuries of the East had long been brought across the deserts by caravans. That was rather slow and expensive. Besides, the Spaniards and the Portuguese had no part in this trade because the Italian cities had a monopoly of the commerce in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas. In addition, the Turks, a little later, put such a heavy tax on the caravans that even for the Italians the trade was not very profitable.

The discovery of America, when explorers found that the new continent really was not India, gave a new reason for voyages of discovery and exploration. Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru brought back to Spain such immense sums of gold that the treasures of the West Indies, as the new regions were called, outshone the splendors of the East Indies. Gold became more highly prized. The prosperous towns of Europe, whose citizens bought the Eastern luxuries, had very little to barter for them. Consequently the rich men had to pay in gold. By the time America was discovered, gold and silver coins were very scarce indeed in Europe. So precious was gold that other nations ascribed the sudden and great growth of Spain to the quantities of the yellow metal which her adventurers sent home from the Americas.

England also had a long list of explorers. Among them was one whose name is especially familiar. Everyone has heard of Sir Walter Raleigh, who spread his rich coat upon the ground that Queen Elizabeth might walk over a muddy patch without soiling her shoes. He desired particularly to check the growth of Spain. He sent out the expedition which discovered the southeastern coast of North America. Twice he tried to colonize that coast in the region which was named Virginia in honor of the virgin queen, Elizabeth.

These attempts failed, partly because the colonists were more interested in finding gold than in cultivating the soil. Raleigh read all the Spanish accounts of South America and became convinced that there was a nation, called Guiana, of untold wealth, in the interior. He tried to find that country in order to make a present of its stores of gold to Elizabeth.

After his return, he published a sketch of it, which is one of the finest accounts of exploration from that adventurous age. It was read wherever people read English and was immediately translated into German. Six translations into Dutch were made, for the Dutch had become even greater merchants than the Spanish. It was even translated into Latin. Our selection will show us how those stouthearted men more than three hundred years ago went into unknown parts of the world, the hardships that they endured, and the strange native races which they found.

Raleigh's story of his travels is but one of many that were written in that adventurous age. A large number of such stories were collected by Richard Hakluyt and published under the title of Voyages. Since Hakluyt was very patriotic, he hoped that by publishing such wonderful tales he would inspire men to add new territories to the British realm. Other men wrote to the same effect. You have read of Captain John Smith, who did so much to establish the first permanent English settlement in America, and of his efforts to persuade men and women to seek homes in this new land. A little later the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth, and from that time England, as well as Spain and France, began to colonize the new world.

The impulse to learn the wonders of the world, to find new regions, to find gold, thus passed into a great movement toward colonization. The process has continued from the sixteenth century to the present time. "Finding New Worlds” thus meant, in effect, filling the earth with cities and farms and homes for men to dwell in.

During the sixteenth century another kind of exploration made great advances. Copernicus, who lived in a Polish village, published in 1543 a new theory of the relation of the earth to the sun. For centuries it had been supposed that the earth was the center of the universe; Copernicus held that the earth was one of a group of planets and that the whole system revolved about the sun. With the invention of the telescope, a few years later, Galileo, the great Italian astronomer, confirmed the theories of Copernicus and laid the foundations for a series of discoveries as wonderful as those made by the explorers of lands beyond the sea. At about the same time, also, men began to study animals and plants, to explore the wonders of the human body, and to turn their attention to the study of nature in an effort to make nature serve man. The great scientific movement out of which has grown man's mastery of the physical forces of nature dates from this time of exploration and dis

covery.

"Finding New Worlds," therefore, includes any expansion of men's interests beyond their ordinary pursuits. It means broader horizons. Whether it brings one to the first sight of a new continent, makes a path across an untraveled sea, sends the thought of man across the infinite spaces of the heavens; or whether it explores the wonder of a flower, or finds a way by which a desert may become a fertile land in which men may dwell, or develops a giant industry, the impulse is the same. Thus to the ideals of conduct and service and loyalty that the Age of Chivalry supplied to the modern man we add that great hunger for discovery and invention characteristic of Raleigh's period, but a powerful motive in modern life as well.