COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 269 



day. Several volumes have been written on the subject, the most 

 important of which is a report of the Eoyal Academy of History at 

 Madrid, which, at the request of the late King of Spain and the people 

 of Havana, made an investigation, and decided in favor of the claims 

 of the Cuban capital. The whole question rests upon the integrity of 

 the inscriptions on the casket that was found in 1877. If they are gen 

 uine the cathedral of Santo Domingo contains the bones of Columbus. 

 An interesting series of reprints from early publications illustrating 

 the voyages of Columbus was given, all of them being engravings of 

 the sixteenth century. 



THE CHRISTENING OF AMERICA ILLUSTRATED. 



During the summer of 1891, with the permission of the Secretary of 

 State, and under my direction, Capt. Frank H. Mason, United States 

 consul-general at Frankfort-on the-Main, Germany, who is a thorough 

 scholar and artist, spent some time at the old town of St. Die, in 

 Lorraine, investigating the manner in which the New World received 

 the name America, and obtaining relics of the men who christened it. 

 The results of Captain Mason s work were shown at the Madrid Expo 

 sition by a series of most interesting views of the place as it looked in 

 the early part of the sixteenth century and as it appears to-day. He 

 secured also the portraits of all of the men who are responsible for the 

 name America, and from the early records of the place obtained much 

 interesting information concerning them that had never been published. 



For more than three centuries Vespucci rested under the disgrace 

 of having usurped the title of the lands which Columbus discovered. 

 It was not until 1837 that Alexander von Humboldt pointed out the 

 real culprit, and showed that the name America was first suggested by 

 a paragraph in a small Latin treatise written by Martin Waldseemuller 

 and published during the year 1507 at St. Die, a village in southeast 

 ern Lorraine. This little book was entitled Cosmographiae Introductio 

 (the rudiments of geography), and the story of its authorship and pub 

 lication and the unforeseen part it played in christening the Western 

 Hemisphere forms one of the most curious and fascinating narratives in 

 the whole record of bibliography. 



The manuscript of Cosniographia3 was begun during the summer of 

 1506, within a month, it may be, of the day when Christopher Colum 

 bus, already poor, neglected, and discredited at court, was laid in his 

 humble grave. It was finished during the following winter, and the 

 first edition was published on the &quot;VII Kalend, May, 1507,&quot; which cor 

 responds under the Gregorian calendar to the 25th of April in that 

 year. The success of the enterprise was immediate and extraordinary. 

 Four editions of the Cosmographise were published at St. Die within 

 less than five months, two bearing the date of April 25, as .above 

 stated, and two more marked the U III Kalends Septembris,&quot; which 

 corresponds to the 29th of August. The title is as follows : 



