He went to America in 1531, and after serving his order zealously in Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, was chosen to explore the country north of Sonora, whose wealth was pictured in the hearsay stories of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.
Hearsay evidence and the testimony of the perjured informer Lord Howard, whom Sidney had been instrumental in introducing to his friends, were first produced.
In that case it was probably not written with any direct polemic against writings of St Paul, but against hearsay versions of his teaching that had reached Jerusalem.
That he should not have known better, even by hearsay, than to address the House of Commons in fantastic phrase from the mouth of a fantastic figure is indeed remarkable, but not that he retained self-confidence enough to tell the unwitting crew who laughed him down that a time would come when they would hear him.
Marquette mapped the Platte from hearsay in 1673; French explorers followed it to the Forks in 1739; and, after Nebraska passed to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, successive American exploring expeditions left traces in its history.
It has been conjectured that the "estuary" here mentioned refers to the Baltic, the existence of which as a separate sea was unknown to all ancient geographers; but the obscure manner in which it is indicated, as well as the inaccuracy of the statements concerning the place from whence the amber was actually derived, both point to the sort of hearsay accounts which Pytheas might readily have picked up on the shores of the German Ocean, without proceeding farther than the mouth of the Ems, Weser or Elbe, which last is supposed by Ukert to have been the limit of his voyage in this direction.
Those who know the book only by hearsay as the work of a furious incendiary will be surprised at the dignity, force and temperance of the style; it was the circumstances that made it inflammatory.
He saw Zuni only from a distance, and his description of it as equal in size to the city of Mexico was probably exact; but he embodied much mere hearsay in his report, the Descubrimiento de las siete ciudades, which led F.
It must be borne in mind that the reports of these speeches which have come down to us were made from hearsay, or at best from recollection, and are necessarily therefore most imperfect.
He has had his reward, for assuredly the portrait of St Louis, from the early collection of anecdotes to the last hearsay sketch of the woeful end at Tunis, with the famous enseignement which is still the best summary of the theoretical duties of a Christian king in medieval times, is such as to take away all charge of vulgarity or mere commerage from Joinville, a charge to which otherwise he might perhaps have been exposed.
On the other hand, it is urged that, though Guyon and Du Verdier were in a sense contemporaries, they wrote long after the events, and that the testimony of the former is vitiated, not merely by its extreme vagueness, but by the fact .that it occurs in a plaidoyer, tending to exculpate physicians from the charge of unorthodoxy; that Du Verdier in another place assigns the Pantagrueline Prognostication to this same unknown student of Valence, and had therefore probably confused and hearsay notions on the subject; that the rasher and fiercer tone, as well as the apparent repetitions, are sufficiently accounted for on the supposition that Rabelais never finally revised the book, which indeed dates show that he could not have done, as the fourth was not finally settled till just before his death; and that it is perfectly probable, and indeed almost certain, that it was prepared from his papers by another hand, which is responsible for the anachronous allusions above referred to.