The Anatomy of Melancholy

If there is, I shall soon find out whether Marco Polo the Venetian's account of the great city of Quinsay and of Cambalu is true or false; whether such places exist, or whether, as the Jesuit Matteo Ricci has written, China and Cathay are one and the same, and the Great Khan of Tartary and the king of China are the same ruler; whether Xuntain and Quinsay, and the city of Cambalu, are that new Peking; or whether there is such a wall, four hundred leagues long, separating China from Tartary.

Whether Prester John is in Asia or Africa: Marco Polo the Venetian places him in Asia; the most widely accepted opinion is that he is emperor of the Abyssinians, in what was formerly Ethiopia, now Nubia, beneath the equator in Africa.

Whether Guinea is an island or part of the continent; or whether that hungry Spaniard's discovery of the Unknown Southern Land, or Magellanica, is as true as the discovery in Mercurius Britannius, or the one in Utopia, or the one in Lucinia. Yet it may very probably be so: for, extending as it does from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Antarctic Circle and lying in the temperate zone, it must surely reveal flourishing kingdoms to future generations in time, as America did to the Spaniards.

Schouten and Le Maire have done well in exploring the region of the Strait of Magellan, finding a more convenient passage to the Pacific Ocean. I think some of our modern Argonauts should pursue the rest.

As I pass Madagascar, I would see that great bird, the roc, which can carry a man and horse, or an elephant; and that Arabian phoenix described by Adricomius. I would see Egypt's pelicans and those Scythian griffins in Asia.

And afterwards, in Africa, I would examine the sources of the Nile: whether Herodotus, Seneca, Pliny in book 5, chapter 9, and Strabo in book 5 give the true cause of its annual flooding; whether Pigafetta gives a correct account of it, or of the Niger and Senegal. I would examine Cardan's explanations, Scaliger's and the rest.

Does it come from those Etesian winds, or from snow melting in mountains beneath the equator—for the Jordan overflows each year when the snow melts on Mount Lebanon—or from those heavy, continual downpours so common within the tropics when the sun is directly overhead? These cause vast floods in the Senegal, Marañón, Orinoco and the other great rivers of the torrid zone, which generally undergo the same changes at fixed seasons. With good agriculture and government, their regions may undoubtedly become as populous, as well cultivated and as fruitful as Egypt itself, or Cochinchina.