670 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 



old; that he was living duriug a period wbeu it was possible to be a 

 cheat and at the same time regarded as a " hombre de bien.^^ It was a 

 time which it is ditficult to understand now, because the society of the 

 fifteenth century lived among troubles of all sorts, which influenced all 

 the ideas and relations of men ; and the honesty of men during that 

 period can not be compared with our actual ideas on the subject. With 

 Cristoforo Colombo everything is clear and explained easily, while on 

 the contrary with Amerigho Vespucci everything is obscure, or even 

 clashes with well-known facts, and all the time his defenders or friends 

 are obliged to have recourse to suppositions and to throw the blame 

 upon others without the slightest proof and against plain facts. It is 

 going too far to say with de Humboldt that V^espucci is " the victim of 

 a concourse of fortuitous circumstances," and of " the exaggerations of 

 unskillful and dangerous friends," for it is evident that Vespucci him- 

 self did all he could to create those circumstances, and during his life 

 he never did anything to correct his " unskillful and dangerous friends " 

 of St. Die, Strasburg, and Metz. 



A name for a continent covering a whole hemisphere can not come as 

 a spontaneous generation, and as Pasteur says, " spontaneous genera- 

 tion " does not exist in nature nor in philology. There is always a source 

 and a base, and until the re-discoverj^ of a tribe of Indians called 

 Amerriques, formerly powerful, and who have always lived in a coun- 

 try rich in gold and close to the coast ex[)lored first by Colombo and 

 afterward by Vespucci, it was im})ossible to give a rational and satis- 

 factory explanation of the christening of the New W orld. A writer has 

 said with great pertinence, " The attribution of the name America to 

 Vespucci has been respected especially because there was no other 

 solution to oppose to it." 



After almost four centuries it is impossible to expect that everj'^ fact 

 should be sustained by authentic documents and indisputable proofs. 

 Many of the archives have been destroyed, and we are reduced often — 

 too often — to suppositions and probabilities. That the publication of 

 the " Cosmographiae Introductio" of St. Die was directed against the 

 reputation of Cristoforo Colombo is an undeniable fact, and that some 

 secret lay at the bottom of it is plain enough. Nothing is truly known 

 as to how the French manuscript came into the hands of King Ken^, 

 nor what part Vespucci took in the matter. We are reduced to in- 

 ferences from the known facts of Vespucci sending his accounts of his 

 voyages in all directions. Bis admirers and partisans are obliged to 

 make more suppositions and have given less probable explanations than 

 his adversaries, and the custom adopted of throwing upon others all the 

 manifest and glaring errors in order to take off all blame from 

 Vespucci is only a '■^desseiii coiipable d'agrandir artijicieusement le merite 

 de Vespucci,''^* at the expense of the veracity and knowledge of some 

 of his contemporaries. 



*Examen critique, ywl. v, p. 187 



