364 COSMOS. 



The important era of geographical discoveries and of the 

 sudden opening of an unknown hemisphere, not only extended 

 our knowledge of the earth, but it also expanded our views of 

 the whole universe, or in other words, of the visible vault of 

 heaven. Since man, to borrow a fine expression of Garci- 

 laso de la Vega, in his wanderings to distant regions sees 

 " lands and stars simultaneously change,""' the advance to the 

 equator on both coasts of Africa and even beyond the 

 southern extremity of the New Continent, must have pre- 

 sented to travellers by sea and land, the glorious aspect of 

 the southern constellations, longer and more frequently 

 than could have been the case at the time of Hiram and 

 the Ptolemies, or during the Roman dominion, and the period 

 in which the Arabs maintained commercial intercourse with 

 the nations dwelling on the shores of the Red Sea or of the 

 Indian Ocean, between the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the 

 western peninsula of India. Amerigo Vespucci, in his letters, 

 Vicente Yariez Pinzon, Pigafetta, the companion of Magel- 

 lan and Elcano, and Andrea Corsali, in his voyage to Cochin 

 in the East Indies, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, 

 gave the first and most animated accounts of the southern sky 

 (beyond the feet of the Centaur and the glorions constellation 

 Argo). Amerigo, who had higher literary acquirements, and 

 whose style was also more redundant than that of the others, 

 extolls, not ungracefully, the glowing richness of the light and 

 the picturesque grouping and strange aspect of the constella- 

 tions that circle round the southern pole, which is surrounded 

 Try so few stars. He maintains in his letters to Pierfrancesco de' 

 Medici, that he had carefully devoted his attention, on his third 

 voyage, to the southern constellations, having made drawings 

 of them and measured their polar distances. His communica- 

 tions regarding these observations do not indeed leave much 

 cause to regret that any portion of them should have been lost. 



I find that the first mention of the mysterious black 

 specks (coal-bags) was made by Anghiera, in the year 1510. 

 They had already been observed in 1499 by the companions 

 of Vicente Yanez Pinzon, on the expedition dispatched from 

 Palos, and which took possession of the Brazilian Cape San 



* Alonso de Ercilla has imitated the passage of Garcilaso in the 

 Araucana : "Climas passe, mude constelaciones." See Cosmos, p. 428. 



