AUSTRALIA A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 87 necessarily come into the Hands of navigators and geo- 1787 graphers^ it may be supposed that the name applied to the country by Flinders was gradually adopted by them in the first instance^ and so met with general acceptation. The change of name suggested by him seems to have been effected during the ten years which succeeded the publication of his work.* But it would not be correct to say that he was the first geographer to make use of the word. He had seen it in Dalrymple's Collection of Voyages in the South Dairyinpi«, Pacifict — a work which, comprising, as it did, all the geo- ^^^^ graphical knowledge on the subject at that time, was cer- tainly well known to Flinders. The author was a great authority on geography during, the period in which he wrote — a fact sufficiently shown by his appointment as hydro- grapher to the Admiralty. In the introduction to his Col- lection of Voyages, alluding to the difEerent divisions of his work adopted by de Brosses in his Histoire des Navigations aux Terrea Australes, Dalrymple said : — I have inserted another head of partition, Australia, compre- hending the discoveries at a distance from America to the east- ward. Under this title he classified '^ all the lands and islands to the eastward of South America." The idea was probably De BroMee, suggested by the name Austral-Asia, applied by de Brosses to the discoveries in the South Pacific, exclusive of those to
- In the first edition of his Description of the Colony, published in 1819,
Wentworth referred to it simply as situated on the east coast of New Hol- land ; but in the third edition, published in 1824, he added, that "the most eminent modem geographers have given to it the very appropriate name of Australia." The change of name would seem to have ta!ken place between those dates. O'Hara's History of New South Wales, the first edition of which appeared in 1817, and the second in 1818, made no mention of Aus- tralia in either, usins the old name only. As it may be assumed that neither O'Hara nor Wentworth would have overlooked a point of so much interest as the adoption of a new name for the territory, had it occurred previously to the time when they compiled their works, the change may be said to date from about 1820. See note, p. 92. t An Historical Collection of the several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean, by Alexander Dalrymple, Esq., London, 1770. In his work on the Early Voyages to Terra Australis, now called Australia, pub- lished by the Hakluyt Society in 1859, the author, R. H. Major, speaks of Dalrymple as one '* to whom, perhaps next to Hakluyt, this country is the Digitized by Google
