COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 271 



Duke Rene II, &quot;King of Jerusalem and Sicily,&quot; was a grandson of 

 &quot;Good King Rene,&quot; and was not only a scholar and patriot but a soldier 

 of shining renown in an age when prowess on the field was the one sure 

 title to fame. As the hero of the battle of Morat and the chivalrous con 

 queror of Charles the Bold, he figures conspicuously in the annals of his 

 time. Upon his accession to the throne of Lorraine he found his country 

 invaded and harassed by Charles and his Burgundiaus. After repeated 

 but fruitless appeals to the King of France for promised aid, he raised 

 a force of Swiss and Germans, and joining to these his own scanty but 

 patriotic army, he fell upon and completely routed the invaders before 

 the walls of Nancy, in the year 1477, and there is to be seen to day in 

 the marshes near the town a cross which marks the spot where the body 

 of Charles was found among the debris of the fight. Rene gave his 

 fallen adversary a magnificent burial, and devoted the remainder of his 

 life to study, the encouragement of learning, and to repairing the fortunes 

 of his war- wasted province. He died in 1508, and his epitaph tells us 

 that he loved but three things justice, peace, and letters. 



It was the custom for learned men in those times to conceal their 

 personal identity under a classical pseudonym, and accordingly the 

 young graduate at Freiburg assumed a Greco-Latinized rendition of his 

 somewhat archaic family name and called himself Martinus tlylaco- 

 mylus. That is to say, the German W aid-see muller (miller of the lake- 

 in the- woods) was converted into a combination of the Greek words 

 Hyle (forest) and mylos (miller). 



The real authors of the Cosmographia3 were Martin Waldseemuller 

 arid his learned and devoted assistant, Matthias Ringman. Of the 

 family and antecedents of Waldseemuller little is known beyond the fact 

 that his parents lived in Freiburg, where Martin was born about 148 L, 

 and on the 7th of December, 1490, was enrolled by Rector Conrad Knoll 

 as a primary student in the university of that town. At what date he 

 first went to St. Die can only be conjectured. It was apparently in 1504 

 or 1505, at which time he was in his twenty-second or twenty-third year. 

 He was then an accomplished Greek and Latin scholar, a skillful mathe 

 matician and draftsman, and was inspired and excited by the geo 

 graphical discoveries which were then reconstructing men s ideas of the 

 physical globe. The pious members of the Vosgien Gymnase, whose 

 proposed revision of Ptolemy was to be based on the original Greek 

 text, apparently engaged for the work of revision the young secular, 

 who, being fresh from the university lectures, would possess all the 

 latest information. 



The cathedral, with its exquisite gothic cloisters and pretty outdoor 

 reading pulpit facing the quadrangle; the petite Eglise archaic, in its 

 simplicity, but pure in style as a Grecian temple, encircled by the cita 

 del walls of red sandstone, softened and enriched in color by the storm 

 and sunshine of centuries, all remain stately and beautiful as ever; but 

 the Chapitre is no longer supreme, and a modern Protestant church, 



