Ixxxviii NOTES. 



enough to enjoy the tidings of the discover} of the Cape of Good Hope by 

 Diaz, and that of the tropical part of the new continent by Columbus. 



( 42! ) p. 270. As the old continent, from the western extremity of the 

 Iberian peninsula to the coast of China, comprehends almost 130 of longi- 

 tude, there remain about 230 as the space which Columbus should have had 

 to traverse to reach Cathay (China) ; but less if he only proposed to reach 

 Zipangi (Japan). This difference of 230 which I have taken, is between the 

 Portuguese Cape St. Vincent (11 20' W. of Paris), and the far projecting 

 part of the Chinese coast near the then so celebrated port of Quinsay, so often 

 named by Columbus and Toscanelli (lat. 30 28', long. 117 47' E. of Paris). 

 (Synonymes for Quinsay in the province of Tscheldang are Kanfu, Hang- 

 tscheufu, Kingszu.) The general commerce in the east of Asia was shared, in 

 the 13th century, between Quinsay and Zaitun (Pinghai or Tseuthung) oppo- 

 site to the island of Formosa (then Tnngfan) in 25 5' N. lat. (see Klaproth, 

 Tableau hist, de 1'Asie, p. 227). The distance* of Cape St. Vincent from 

 Zipangi (Niphon) is 22 of longitude less than from Quinsay, or about 209 

 instead of 230 53'. It is a striking circumstance that, through accidental 

 compensations, the oldest statements, those of Eratosthenes, and Strabo (lib. 

 i. p. 64), come within 10 of the above mentioned result of 129 for the 

 difference of longitude of the otKovpevri, Strabo, in the very place where he 

 alludes to the possible existence of two great habitable continents in the 

 northern hemisphere, says that our oixovfjievi) in the parallel of Thinse (Athens, 

 see Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 223 ; Engl. edit. Vol. ii. p. 188) takes more than one- 

 third of the earth's circumference. Marinus of Tyre, being misled by the 

 length of the time occupied in the navigation from Myos Hormos to India, 

 by the erroneously assumed direction of the greater axis of the Caspian from 

 east to west, and by the over estimation of the length of the route by land to 

 the country of the Seres, gave to the old continent a breadth of 225 instead 

 of 129, thus advancing the Chinese coast to the Sandwich Islands. Columbus 

 naturally preferred this result to that of Ptolemy, according to which Quinsay 

 should have been found in the meridian of the eastern part of the archipelago 

 of the Carolinas. Ptolemy, in the Almagest (ii. 1), places the coast of the 

 Sina at 180 ; and in his Geography (lib. i. cap. 12), at 177i. As Columbus 

 estimated the navigation from Iberia to the Sines at 120, and Toscanelli even 

 at only 52, they might both, estimating the length of the Mediterranean at 

 about 40, have naturally callel the apparently so hazardous enterprise only 

 a "brevissimo camino." Martin Behaim, also, on his "world apple" (the 

 celebrated globe which he finished in 1492, and which is still kept in the 



