A great invention or discovery is often like a daring leap, but it is from land to land, not from nothing to something; and if we look at the subject with this consideration fully before us, we shall probably admit that Columbus had as large a share in the merit of his discovery as most inventors or discoverers can lay claim to.

If the idea which has rendered him famous was not in his mind at the outset of his career of investigation, at any rate he had from the first a desire for discovery, or, as he says himself, the wish to know the secrets of this world.

It may be a question whether this impulse soon brought him to his utmost height of survey, and that he then only applied to learning to confirm his first views; or whether the impulse merely carried him along with growing perception of the great truth he was to prove, into deep thinking upon cosmographical studies, Portuguese discoveries, the dreams of learned men, the labours of former geographers, the dim prophetic notices of great unknown lands, and vague reports amongst mariners of driftwood seen on the seas.

But at any rate we know that he arrived at a fixed conclusion that there was a way by the west to the Indies; that he could discover this way, and so come to Cipango, Cathay, the Grand Khan, and all he had met with in the gorgeous descriptions of Marco Polo and other ancient authorities.

We may not pretend to lay down the exact chronological order of the formation of the idea in his mind, in fact, to know more about it than he would probably have been able to tell us himself.