Note 55 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Its effect was probably to enlarge more than to modify appreciably the current ideas. A large proportion of the importations from the East may have been indebted to the invention, as much as to the credulity, of the adventurers; and we might be disposed to believe with Hume, that 'men returning from so great a distance used the liberty [a too general one] of imposing every fiction upon their believing audience.'