The Naming of America. 215- 



Columbus to his great voyage, and which is still to be seen ia 

 Seville with marginalia penned by the hand of Columbus 

 himself. Americans will ere long pilgrim to Saint Die, as the 

 mother of their name, and so the source of a ^stream flowing 

 further than the Mississippi, yes from pole to pole. 



From the peaks of the Vosges, towering above the college 

 of Hylacomylus, you can almost espy Strasburg, which claims 

 the invention of printing, Freiburg where gunpowder was first 

 compounded in Christendom, and Spires where Protestantism 

 first assumed its name. 



The new name for the new continent, proposed by Hylaco- 

 mylus in 1507, was employed about five years after by Vadia- 

 nus of Vienna, who indeed, until recent researches, was 

 mistaken for its author. But three years sooner, or in 1509, it 

 was adopted by an anonymous writer, who then published, in 

 the neighboring Strasburg, his " Globus Ifundi, or a descrip- 

 tion of the world as a round globe, whereby every man, evea 

 if he do not know much, can see with his own eyes that there 

 are antipodes whose feet are opposite ours, together with 

 many other things concerning the fourth part of the earth re- 

 cently discovered by Americus." 



Here, in this title, is one secret of the special importance 

 attached to discoveries in South America, and hence to the 

 exploits of Americus. His logic of facts rooted up two dog- 

 mas which had been viewed as essential to orthodoxy, one 

 that there could not be antipodes, and the other that the equa- 

 torial zone was too hot to be inhabited. A commentator oa 

 Albertus Magnus soon detecting in him the same heretical 

 taint, exclaimed in 1514, as if at the fulfillment of prophecy,- 

 "Lo! Albertus, two centuries ago, conceived that the earth 

 might be inhabited beyond the equator, as Americus has found 

 and described it" — things not in heaven and on earth but 

 under the earth. 



Interest in occidental exploration turned mainly southward 

 for another reason, namely, that the first adventurers to the- 



