292 EPOCHS IN THE HISTOBY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OJf 



however, whether it received its name from them ; for Dante, 

 the celebrated passage of the Purgatorio 



THE ^\" 1 nu TOlsi a man destra, e posi mentc 

 All' altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle 

 Non viste mai fuor ch' alia prima gente :** 



Amerigo Yespucci, who, at the aspect of the southern 

 firmament in his third voyage, first recalled these lines, and 

 even boasted that " he now beheld in his own person the 

 four stars never before seen save by the first human pair," 

 were still unacquainted with the denomination of " Southern 

 Cross." Yespucci says simply, that the four stars form a 

 rhomboidal figure (una mandorla) ; and this remark belongs 

 to the year 1501. As sea voyages round the Cape of 

 Good Hope and in the Pacific Ocean, by the routes which 

 Gama and Magellan had opened, multiplied, and as Christian 

 missionaries pressed forward into the newly discovered tro- 

 pical lands of America, the fame of this constellation in- 

 creased more and more. I find it first mentioned as a 

 " wondrous cross (croce maravigliosa), more glorious than 

 all the constellations of the entire heavens," by the Floren- 

 tine Andrea Corsali (1517), and afterwards, in 1520, by 

 Pigafetta. The Florentine extols Dante's "prophetic 

 spirit," as if the great poet had not possessed as much eru- 

 dition as creative genius, as if he had not seen Arabian 

 celestial globes, and held communication with many oriental 

 travellers from Pisa ( 44 9) . That in the Spanish settlements in 

 tropical America, the first settlers were accustomed to infer 

 the hour of the night from the inclined or perpendicular 

 position of the Southern Cross, as is still done, was already 

 remarked by Acosta in his " Historia natural y moral de las 

 Indias." ( 45 ) 



