_Australia_ got its name, which means "land of the south," from Portuguese and Spanish sailors, who reached its western coasts early in the sixteenth century. They never went inland, or made any settlements, but in the queer, inaccurate maps which early geographers made, they put down a _Terra Australis_, or "southern land," and later, when Englishmen did at last explore and colonize the continent, they kept this name _Australia_. This Latin name reminds us of the fact that Latin was in the Middle Ages the language used by all scholars in their writings, and names on maps were written in Latin too, and so a great modern continent like Australia came to have an old Latin name.
There is a great deal of history in the names of countries. Take the names of the countries of Europe. _England_ is the land of the _Angles_, and from this we learn that the Angles were the chief people of all the tribes who came over and settled in Britain after the Romans left it. They spread farthest over the land, and gave their name to it; just as the _Franks_, another of these Northern peoples, gave their name to France, and the _Belgæ_ gave theirs to _Belgium_. The older name of _Britain_ did not die out, but it was seldom used. It has really been used much more in modern times than it ever was in the Middle Ages. It is used especially in poetry or in fine writing, just as _Briton_ is instead of _Englishman_, as in the line--
"Britons never, never, never shall be slaves."
The name _Briton_ is now used also to mean Irish, Scotch, and Welsh men--in fact, any British subject. We also speak of _Great Britain_, which means England and Scotland. When the Scottish Parliament was joined to the English in 1702 some name had to be found to describe the new "nation," and this was how the name _Great Britain_ came into use, just as the _United Kingdom_ was the name invented to describe Great Britain and Ireland together when the Irish Parliament too was joined to the English in 1804.
We see how Gaul and Britain, as France and England were called in Roman times, had their names changed after the fall of the Roman Empire; but most of the countries round the Mediterranean Sea kept their old names, just as they kept for the most part their old languages. Italy, Greece, and Spain all kept their old names, although new peoples flocked down into these lands too. But though new peoples came, in all these lands they learned the ways and languages of the older inhabitants, instead of changing everything, as the English did in Britain. And so it was quite natural that they should keep their own names too.