Jules Verne, in this chief of his works, has set himself to tell the story of all the most stirring adventure of which we have any written record—to give the history, "from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to that of Livingstone and Stanley," of those voyages of exploration and discovery which are among the most exciting episodes in the history of human enterprise. The wonderful journey of Marco Polo; the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama; the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro; the old Arctic discoveries; the explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in North America—these exploits form a worthy subject for the most ambitious work of such a writer; and when he brings to the treatment of such material all the dash and vivid picluresqueness of his own creations, it may be imagined that he makes a book worth reading.
