OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 6G5 



Augustin.* The Canopo fosco ( Canopus niger) of Amerigo, 

 is probably also one of these coal-bags. The intelligent Acosta 

 compares them to the darkened portion of the moon's disc 

 (in partial eclipses), and appears to ascribe them to a void in 

 the heavens, or to an absence of stars. Rigaud has shown 

 how the reference to the coal-bags, of which Acosta says 

 positively, that they are visible in Peru (and not in Europe), 

 and move round the south pole, has been regarded by a cele- 

 brated astronomer as the first notice of spots on the sun.f 

 The knowledge of the two Magellanic clouds, has been un- 

 justly ascribed to Pigafetta, for I find that Anghiera, on the 

 observations of Portuguese seamen, mentions these clouds 

 fully eight years before the termination of Magellan's voy- 

 age of circumnavigation. He compares their mild efful- 

 gence to that of the milky way. The larger cloud did not, 

 however, escape the vigilance of the Arabs, and it is proba- 

 bly the white ox (El Bakar) of their southern sky, the white 

 spot of which the astronomer Abdurrahman Sofi says that 

 it could not be seen at Bagdad or in northern Arabia, but at 

 Tehama, and in the parallel of the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. 

 The Greeks and Romans, who followed the same path under 

 the Lagides and later, did not observe, or at least make no 

 mention in their extant writings, of a cloud of light which, 

 nevertheless, between 11 and 12 north latitude, rose three 

 degrees above the horizon, at the time of Ptolemy, and more 

 than four degrees in that of Abdurrahman, in the year 1000. J 

 At the present day, the altitude of the central part of the 



* Petr. Mart. Ocean., Dec. i. lib .ix. p. 96;Examen crit., t. iv. pp. 221 

 and 317. 



t Acosta, Hist, natural de las India,?, lib. i. cap. 2; Eigaud, Ac- 

 count of Harriot's Astron. Papers, 1833, p. 37. 



J Pigafetta, Primo Viaggio intorno al Globo terracqueo, pubbl. da 

 C. Amoretti, 1800, p. 46; Ramuslo, vol. i. p. 355, c.; Petr. Mart. 

 Ocean., Dec. iii. lib. i. p. 217. (According to the events referred to by 

 Anghiera, Dec. ii. lib. x. p. 204, and Dec. iii. lib. x. p. 232, the pas- 

 sage in the Oceanica which speaks of the Magellanic clouds, must 

 have been written between 1514 and 1516.) Andrea Corsali (Ramusio, 

 vol. i. p. 177) also describes, in a letter to Giuliano de Medici, the 

 rotatory and translator}' movement of "due nugolette di ragionevol gran- 

 dezza." The star which he represents between Nubecula major and 

 minor appears to me to be /3 Hydrae ; Examen crit., t. v. pp. 234-238). 

 Eegarding Petrus Theodori of Embden, and Houtmann, the pupil of 

 the mathematician Plancius, see an historical article by Olbers, in 

 Schumacher's Jahrbuch fur 1840, s. 249. 



