Excerpt from The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525 IT is a fact that America in the early ages was one of the inhabited parts of the earth. The Egyptians, who were among the first of the peoples of the east ern hemisphere to use letters and to write history, fur nish the earliest known account of the inhabitants of this continent. It is also a truth that some ancient geographers and philosophers, who had no personal knowledge of the existence of a primitive people in the/western hemisphere, regarded the information re corded by the Egyptians as fictitious and incredible. When Columbus proposed to go to this inhabited realm beyond the western ocean almost all the learned men of Portugal and Spain opposed the undertaking as visionary, and not a few of them asserted that the navi gator's opinions were absurd, because, as they argued, no one of all the seamen who had lived since the crea tion of the world had discovered land beyond Hibernia. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.