Our most provident and glorious Creator so furnished countries with se — Peter Heylin

"A Continent is a great quantity of Land, not separated by any Sea from the rest of the World, as the whole Continent of Europe, Asia, Africa."

"High Churchman and scholar though was, our friend Heylyn puts on no saturnine or crabbed visage. His manner, on the contrary, is gay, lively, unctuous, flavorous, good-humoured, and full of character. His style has a chuckle in it whenever he can tell you a quaint story or an odd bit of national manners. Great relish for a joke has Peter; and you may now and then catch him telling a naughty tale with a twinkle in the eye. With no solemn pretence of abstruse wisdom does our geographical mentor conduct us on the long pilgrimage through a world; but rather with the air of a genial and well-informed companion, familiar with history, antiquity, and tradition; full of anecdote and illustration; observant of new forms and modes of life; not deficient in the broad daylight of statistics (such as were then known) yet having strong love for glimmering fables and twilight myths; no indiscriminate swallower of lies, though willing to believe any strange tale; and, poet-like, increasing in riches as he passes onward into regions and more remote. Sometimes we laugh with Peter, sometimes at him; yet there is no denying that his book is the result of great industry, great learning, much careful research in many volumes, and considerable literary tact in selection and condensation. Let us dip a little into the old quarto, and see how the world has altered in many things—how remained stationary in some—since the year sixteen hundred and twenty-nine."

"Heylyn,... with commendable honesty, will not make himself and his readers merry with the follies of the Spanish character, without also enumerating its virtues; one of which he asserts to be "an unmoved patience in suffering adversities, accompanied with a settled resolution to overcome them: a noble virtue, of which in their [West] Indian discoveries they showed excellent proofes, and received for it a glorious and a golden reward." It is to be feared that the Spaniards have degenerated since those days. Adversities enough, Heaven knows, they have had to encounter; but as yet they have not overcome them."

"Concerning rivers, we find a scientific opinion which we fear will not pass muster with the learned of our own times. It appears that rivers are "engendered in the hollow concavities of the earth," and are derived from congealed air: to give us a lively idea of which engendering, Peter informs us that it is in the same manner "as we see the aire in winter nights to be melted into a pearlie dew, sticking on our glasse windowes."

"Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative English geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix science and theology."

"But alas! all these unkindnesses and neglects were trivial to the irreparable loss of his eye sight: of which he found a sensible and gradual decay for many years; and therefore was the better enabled to endure it. But about the year 1654. tenebrescunt videntes per foramina [darkly you look through the holes]; those that looked out of the windows were darkened, and he was constrained to make use of other mens eyes (but not in the sense as great persons do) to guide him in the Motions of his Body, tho not in the Contemplations of his Mind."