OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 621 



each work being in a great measure based upon the preceding 

 ones. These encyclopaedic compilations were the forerunners 

 of the great work of Father Reisch, the Margerita philosophica, 

 the first edition of which appeared in 1486, and which for 

 half a century operated in a remarkable manner on the dif- 

 fusion of knowledge. I must here pause for a moment, to 

 consider the "Picture of the World" of Cardinal AUiacus 

 (Pierre d'Ailly). I have elsewhere shown that the work en- 

 titled " Imago Mundi," exercised a greater influence on the 

 discovery of America, than did the correspondence with the 

 learned Florentine Toscanelli.* All that Columbus knew of 

 Greek and Roman writers, all those passages of Aristotle, 

 Strabo, and Seneca, on the proximity of Eastern Asia to the 

 Pillars of Hercules, which, as his son Fernando says, were the 

 means of inciting him to discover the Indian lands (autoridad 

 de los escritores para mover al Almirante a descubrir las 

 Indias), were gathered by the Admiral from the writings of 

 the Cardinal. He must have carried these works with him on 

 his voyages, for in a letter which he addressed to the Spanish 

 monarchs from the Island of Haiti, in the month of October 

 1498, he translated word for word a passage from Alliacus' 

 treatise, de quantitate terrce habitabilis, which appears to have 

 made a deep impression on his mind. Columbus probably 

 did not know that Alliacus had also transcribed verbatim 

 from an earlier work, the Opus majus of Roger Bacon.f Sin- 

 gular age, when the combined testimony of Aristotle and 

 Averroes (Avenryz), of Esdras, and of Seneca, regarding the 

 small extent of the ocean in comparison with continental masses, 

 could serve to convince monarchs of the expediency of a costly 

 enterprise ! 



I have already drawn attention to the marked predilection 

 manifested at the close of the thirteenth century for the study 

 of natural forces, and the progressive and philosophical direc- 



* See my Examen crit., t. i. pp. 61, 64-70, 96-108; t ii. p. 349. 

 ' There are five memoirs de Concordantia astronomia cum iheologia t 

 by Pierre d'Ailly, whom Don Fernando Colon always calls Pedro d 

 Helico. These essays remind us of some very recent ones on the Mosaic 

 Geology, published four hundred years after the Cardinal's." 



t Compare Columbia's letter, Navarrete, Viages y Descubrvniento*, 

 t. i. p. 244, with the Imago mundi of Cardinal d'Ailly, cap. 8, ami 

 Roger Bacon's Opus majus, p. 183. 



