OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 297 



since this period, a new and more vigorous activity of the mind 

 and feelings, animated by bold aspirations and hopes which 

 can scarcely be frustrated, has gradually penetrated through 

 all grades of civil society ; that the scanty population of one 

 half of the globe, especially in the portions opposite to Europe, 

 has favored the settlements of colonies, which have been con- 

 verted by their extent and position, into independent states, 

 enjoying unlimited power in the choice of their mode of free 

 government ; and, finally, that religious reform — the precursor 

 of great political revolutions — could not fail to pass through 

 the different phases of its development in a portion of the earth 

 which had become the asylum of all forms of faith, and of the 

 most different views regarding divine things. The daring 

 enterprise of the Genoese seaman is the first link in the im- 

 measurable chain of these momentous events. Accident, and 

 not fraud and dissensions, deprived the continent of America 

 of the name of Columbus.* The New World continuously 



* I have shown elsewhere how a knowledge of the period at which 

 Vespucci was named royal chief pilot alone refutes the accusation first 

 brought against him by the asti'onomer Schoner, of Nuremberg, in 

 1533, of having artfully inserted the words " Terra di Amerigo^^ in 

 charts which he altered. The high esteem which the Spanish court 

 paid to the hydrographical and astronomical knowledge of Amerigo 

 Vespucci is clearly manifested in the instructions (Real titulo con exten- 

 sas facultades) which were given to him when he was appointed pilolo 

 mayor on the 22d of March, 1508. (Navarrete, t. iii., p. 297-302.) He 

 was placed at the head of a true Deposito hydrografico, and was to pre- 

 pare for the Casade Contratacion in Seville (tiie central point of all 

 oceanic expedition) a general description of coasts and account of posi- 

 tions (Padron general), in which all new discoveries were to be an- 

 nually entered. But even as early as 1507 the name of " Ameiici ter- 

 ra" had been pi'oposed for the New Continent by a person whose ex- 

 istence even was undoubtedly unknown to Vespucci, the geographer 

 Waldseemiiller (Martinus Hylacomylus) of Freiburg, in the Breisgau 

 (the director of a printing establishment at St. Die in Lorraine), in a 

 small work entitled Cosmographies Introdiictio, insuj^er quatuor Americi 

 Vespucii Navigationes (irapr. in oppido S. Deodati, 1507). Ringmann, 

 professor of cosmography at Basle (better known under the name of 

 Philesius), Hylacomylus, and Father Gregorius Reisch, who edited the 

 Margarita Philosophica, were intimate friends. In the last-named 

 work we find a treatise written in 1509 by Hylacomylus on architect- 

 ure and perspective. {Examen Crit., t. iv., p. 112.) Laurentius Fhri- 

 sius of Metz, a friend of Hylacomylus, and, like him, patronized by 

 Duke Rene of Lorraine, who maintained a correspondence with Ves- 

 pucci, in the Strasburg edition of Ptolemy, 1522, speaks of Hylacomylus 

 as deceased. In the map of the New Continent contained in this edi- 

 tion, and drawn by Hylacomylus, the name of America occurs for the 

 first time in the editions of Ptolemy^ s Geography. According to my in- 

 vestigations, a map of the world by Petrus Apianus, which was once 

 included in Cramer's edition of Solinus, and a second time in the Va^ 



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