212 COMMERCE WITH necessary land journeys connected with them, and were now disseminated through Europe by the Vene- tians and Genoese, aided by the free and commercial republics of the Low Countries, who conveyed them into the remotest corners of the European world. Down to the close of the fifteenth century, the consumers of Europe were ignorant of the name and situation of the countries which produced the commodities on which they set so high a value. * The great discovery of Vasco Di Gama, in 1498, changed the commercial history of the world, which had remained nearly stationary for three thousand years ; and fourteen years thereafter the Portuguese obtained the first cargo of spices on the spot where they grew. The search for the spiceries of the East, as is well known, and as has been already*mentioned in the course of this work, gave rise to the two great- est events in the history of our species, the discove- ♦ " Navigation, perfected as it is at the present, now opens all the maritime regions of the world to the knowledge of mankind ; but, in the early ages, personal intercourse was impracticable, the communication by sea was unexplored, and travelling by land was precluded by insecurity. The native commodities of orie climate passed into another by in- termediate agents, who were interested in little beyond the profits of the transit ; and nations in a diflPerent hemi- gphere were known respectively, not by their history b^t their ^rodace."— Vincent's Periplus, Vol. I. p. 1.
