That the notices, however, of western lands were not such as to have much weight with other men is sufficiently proved by the difficulty which Columbus had in contending with adverse geographers and men of science in general, of whom, he says, he never was able to convince any one.

After a new world had been discovered, many scattered indications were then found to have foreshown it.

"When he promised a new hemisphere," writes Voltaire, "people maintained that it could not exist, and when he had discovered it, that it had been known a long time." It was to confute such detractors that he resorted to the well known expedient for making an egg stand on end; an illustration of the meaning of originality which, by the way, was not itself original, as Brunelleschi had already employed it when his merit in devising a plan for raising the cupola of Florence cathedral was questioned.
EVIDENCES OF A WESTERN WORLD.
Of the amount of evidence furnished by the testimony of sailors, it is difficult to speak with any degree of accuracy.

Rumours of drift-wood, apparently carved with some savage implements; of mammoth reeds, corresponding with Ptolemy's account of those indigenous to India; even of two corpses, cast up on one of the Azores, and presenting an appearance quite unlike that of any race of Europe or Africa; all seem to have come to the willing ears of Columbus, and to have been regarded by him as "confirmations, strong as proofs of holy writ," of the great theory.
About the year 1470 Columbus arrived at Lisbon.

According to the account given by his son, and adopted by the historian Bossi, he had sailed with Colombo el Mozo (the nephew of that "first Admiral of the family" of whom we have already heard) on a cruise to intercept some Venetian merchantmen on their way home from Flanders.