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Show ANNOTATION A D ADDITIONS. 107 bratcd Infante Henry Duke of Viseo, and founder of the Academy of Sagre , which was presided over by the pilot and cosmographer Mestre Jacome of Majorca; but the Portulano Mediceo, the work of a Genoese navigator in 1351, already contains the name of Cavo Di Non. The pas.<>age round this cape was then as much dreaded as that of Cape Horn has since been, although it is 23' north of the parallel of Teneriffe, and could be reached in a few days' voyage from Cadiz. The Portuguese proverb, " quem passa o Cabo di Num, or Tornara ou nao," could not deter the Infante, whose heraldic French motto, "talent de bien faire," expressed his noble, enterprising, and vigorous character. The name of the cape, in which a play of words on the negative particle has long been supposed, does not appear to me to have had a Portuguese or1gm. Ptolemy placed on the north-west coast of Africa a river Nuius, in the L::ttin version Nunii Ostia. Edrisi speaks of a town, Nul, or Wadi Nun, somewhat more to the south, and three days' journey in the interior: Leo Africanus calls it Belad de Non. Long before the Portuguese squadron of Gilianez, other European navigators had advanced much beyond, or to the southward of, this cape. The Catalan, don ,Jayroe Ferrer, in 1346, as we learn from the Atlas Catalan published by Buchon at Paris, had advanced as far as the Gold River (Rio do Ouro ), in lat. 23° 56'; and Normans, at the end of the 14th century, as far as Sierra Leone in lat. 8° 30'. The merit of having been the first to cross the Equator on the western coast of Africa belongs, however, lib that of so many other memorable achievements, to the Portuguese. e7) p. 30.-" .As a grassy plain, resembling many of the Steppes of Central .Asia." The Llanos of Caraccas and of the Rio Apure and the Meta, over which roam large herds of cattle, are, in the strictest sense of the term, " grassy plains." Their prevaJcnt vegetation, belonging to the two families of Cyperacere and Graminere, consists of various species of Paspalum, P. leptostachyum and P. lenticulare; of Kyllingia, K. monocephala (Rottb.), K. odorata; of Panicum, P. granuliferum, P. micranthum; of Antephora; Aristida; Vilfa; and Anthistria., A. refl.exa, and A. foliosa. Only here ancl there |