238 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



" treme east of Asia is occupied b}' the Indies, China and Tartary, the thi'ee 

 " modern expressions which answer with tolerable accuracy to the India, 

 " land of Seres and Scythia of the ancients." That such a vague idea 

 was prevalent at the time is manifest in the ' Historia rerum ubique ges- 

 " tarum," by ^'Eneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II.). A cop}- of this 

 still exists in the Columbian library, annotated by the admiral's own hand, 

 and the following passage has a number of his remarks on the margin. 

 Mr. Harrisse, in his "Notes on Columbus," gives a photograph of the 

 left half of the page, but the whole passage has been copied from another 

 edition : "Scriptores alii Scytharum nomen multo majus efficiunt, quos a 

 " Germanico limite, usque ad ipsos Seras, et orientale jjelagus occupare 

 " arbitrantur ; et sicut habitabilis terra> australia .Ethiopibus tradiderunt, 

 " pari modo septentrionalia Scythis, quos cum Sarmatis confuderunt," 



Further on is related the origin of the Sc3^thiansfrom two brothers, 

 the offspring of a being called Scythas, half snake, half woman. Their 

 descendants conquered the regions west of the Tanais as far as Thrace, 

 and then, turning their arms eastwards, reached the Nile, reducing all 

 the intermediate nations, and their power extended to the Caspian sea 

 and the Ocean of the East. 



To suppose that the disjoutants in this discussion had not weighed 

 these matters is a serious error, for Harrisse^^^ has cited the very same 

 passage fi'om Soncino's letter to prove that the landfall was not south of 

 Labrador, but on its northeastern coast. It was a mistake for any one 

 arguing for Cape Breton to build on so narrow a foundation as the ren- 

 dering of a word so indefinite as assai, and to take a general name like 

 Tanais in a sense so restricted. The archbishop's argument is as follows : 

 That Tanais is not a broad or vague term, but a definite and well-known 

 country, that region, to wit, inclosed within the great bend of the river 

 Don and inhabited by the Tanaitae. The city of Tanais, he further points 

 out, was lower down, at the mouth of the river, not in the country of 

 Tanais, but on the Asiatic side. He then locates this country between 

 48° and 50° N. lat., and he interprets Soncino to mean that Cabot con- 

 siderably overpassed that country. He says that CaboL could not have 

 overpassed its longitude, therefore he overpassed its latitude, and as Bris- 

 tol is in 51° 80', Cabot sailed south and, considerably overpassing lat. 48°, 

 of necessity he made his landfall somewhere on the island of Cape 

 Breton. He concludes : " The premises rest on unimpeachable authority, 

 " and the conclusion, therefore, emphatically and inexorably excludes 

 " Labrador, Cape St. John and Bonavista." The argument relies much 

 upon the translation of the word "assai," and it is based on Ptolemy and 

 upon the assumption that this definite countrj' inclosed within the bend 

 of the Don was south of 51° 30' upon Ptolemy's maps at that time — 

 which is not the case. 



It is necessary to remind the reader that, up to about A.D. 15G9 or 

 later, when JVIercator and Oitelius broke frankly away from the tradi- 

 tions of the ancient geography, the faith of the learned in Ptolemy was 

 unbounded. The great edition of Ptolemy is that published at Rome in 

 1478. The same copper-])lates were used, unchanged, for the edition 

 also printed at Rome in 1490. These very plates and no other could have 

 been known to Cabot, Columbus, Soncino or anybodj^ else before the year 

 1508. If these authorities referred to Ptolemy at all, that was the 

 Ptolemy — the Greek Ptolemy of A.D. 141, and printed in 1490 or previ- 

 ously — the only Ptolemy existent for them. We learn from a note how 



