158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



first important maps, besides Cassini's, which adopted the Paris merid- 

 ian were that of Capitaine (1789), and that of De Belleyme (1791). 



This over-patriotic selection by the English and French was a bad 

 precedent. The Low Countries must have their meridian at Amster- 

 dam, the Spaniards at Madrid (having previously tried Teneriffe and 

 Cadiz), the Portuguese at Lisbon, the Russians at the Poulkowa Obser- 

 vatory, the United Sates at the Washington Observatory, the Chilians 

 at Santiago, the Brazilians at Rio de Janeiro, and so on. 



These divers pretensions are deplorable, and cause no end of confu- 

 sion, and it is time that a single meridian were established. M. de Chan- 

 courtois, in his " System of Geography," which was presented to the 

 Paris Geographical Society in 1874, proposed to adopt the meridian of 

 the island of St. Michael, in the Azores, which he holds to have been 

 Ptolemy's first meridian ; which was the meridian adopted by Mer- 

 cator ; and which to him appears to be preferable to all other meridi- 

 ans because it traverses the ocean throughout one-half of its length, 

 and in the other half only touches the eastern extremity of Asia, thus 

 constituting a sufficiently exact dividing line between the two main 

 continents, the old and the new. The late M. Henri Longperier pro- 

 posed a meridian traversing the center of Europe, crossing Dalmatia 

 and the Adriatic, and pretty accurately dividing the Eastern from the 

 Western world. 



Again, it has been proposed to establish the first meridian at Jeru- 

 salem, that center of high and honored memories ; but perhaps, just on 

 account of the religious associations, such a selection would not be ap- 

 proved by all nations. For our own part, we confess that we are par- 

 tisans of the jjroject offered by M. Bouthillier de Beaumont, President 

 of the Geneva Geographical Society to the International Congress of 

 Commercial Geography at Paris in 1878. This learned geographer pro- 

 poses the selection of the meridian passing through Behring Strait on 

 the one side of the globe, and 10 east of Paris on the other. It 

 would on the one hand separate the two great continents, and on the 

 other would in Europe follow the line of demarkation between the 

 "Eastern" and the "Western" nations. 



We highly approve this idea of fixing the first meridian exactly 

 10 east of Paris : the conversion of determinations of longitude reck- 

 oned from Paris and Ferro which are very numerous would be thus 

 facilitated. This meridian would pass through Venice and would be 

 very near to Rome, both places dear to the historian and of profound 

 interest to the geographer. Nevertheless, we must not take for the 

 starting-point a place belonging to any particular state, for fear of ex- 

 citing again those national rivalries which have led to the fixing of 

 such a number of national meridians. But the mediator which we 

 propose, in unison with M. Bouthillier de Beaumont, passes also through 

 the island of Levanzo, off the west coast of Sicily. Might not the Ital- 

 ian Government cede this islet to the world of science, to form the site 



