OCEANIC DISCOVERIES*. 267 



when we consider the unfavorable influence which it would 

 doubtlessly have exercised on the direction of great maritime 

 enterprises. 



The discovery and navigation of the Pacific indicate an 

 epoch which was so much the more important with respect 

 to the recognition of great cosmical relations, since it was ow- 

 ing to these events, and therefore scarcely three centuries and 

 a half ago, that not only the configuration of the western coast 

 o[ the New, and the eastern coast of the Old Continent were 

 determined ; but also, what is far more important to meteor- 

 ology, that the numerical relations of the area of land and 

 water upon the surface of our planet first began to be freed 

 from the highly erroneous views with which they had hitherto 

 been regarded. The magnitude of these areas, and their rela- 

 tive distribution, exercise a powerful influence on the quantity 

 of humidity contained in the atmosphere, the alternations in 

 the pressure of the air, the force and vigor of vegetation, the 

 greater or lesser distribution of certain species of animals, and 

 on the action of many other general phenomena and physical 

 processes. The larger area apportioned to the fluid over th* 

 solid parts of the earth's crust (in the ratio of 2fths to 1), doe* 

 certainly diminish the habitable surface for the settlements of 

 the human race, and for the nourishment of the greater por- 

 tion of mammalia, birds, and reptiles ; but it is nevertheless 

 in accordance with the existing laws of organic life, a benefi- 

 cent arrangement, and a necessary condition for the preserva- 

 tion of all living beings inhabiting continents. 



When, at the close of the fifteenth century, a keen desire 

 was awakened for discovering the shortest route to the Asiatic 

 spice lands, and when the idea of reaching the east by sailing 

 to the west simultaneously awoke in the minds of two intel- 

 lectual men of Italy the navigator Christopher Columbus, 

 and the physician and astronomer Paul Toscanelli* the 

 opinion established in Ptolemy's Almagest still prevailed, that 

 the Old Continent occupied a space extending over 180 equa- 

 torial degrees from the western shore of the Iberian peninsula 

 to the meridian of Eastern Sinse, or that it extended from east 



* Paolo Toscanelli was so greatly distinguished as an astronomer, 

 that Behaim's teacher, Regiomontanus, dedicated to him, in 1463, his 

 work De Quadrature/, Circuit, directed against the Cardinal Nicolaus de 

 Cusa. He constructed the great gnomon in the church of Santa Maria 

 Novella at Florence, and died in 1482, at the age of 85, without having 

 lived long enough to enjoy the pleasure of learning the discovery of the 

 Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, and that of the tropical part of the New 

 Continent by Columbus. 



