NOTES. XC1X 



at the head of a true Deposito hydrografico, and was to prepare for the Casa 

 de Contratacion in Seville, (the central point of all Oceanic discoveries,) a 

 general description of coasts and register of positions, in which all new disco- 

 veries were to be entered every year. But the name of " Americi terra" had 

 heen proposed for the New Continent as early as 1507, by a person whose 

 existence even was assuredly unknown to Vespucci, the geographer Waldsee- 

 miiller (Martinus Hylacomylus) of Freiburg in the Breisgau, the director of 

 a printing establishment at St. -Die in Lorraine, in a small work entitled, 

 Cosmographise Introductio, insuper quatuor Americi Vespucii Navigationes 

 (impr. in oppido S. Deodati, 1507). Ringmann, professor of cosmography at 

 Basle, (better known under the name of Philesius,) Hylacomylus and Grego- 

 rius Reisch, who published the Margarita Philosophica, were firm friends. 

 In the last-named work there is a treatise by Hylacomylus on architecture 

 and perspective written in 1509 (Examen crit. T. iv. p. 112). Laurentius 

 Phrisius of Metz, a friend of Hylacomylus, and like him patronised by the Duke 

 Renatus of Lorraine who corresponded by letter with Vespucci, speaks in the 

 Strasburg edition of Ptolemy, 1522, of Hylacomylus as deceased. The map of 

 the New Continent drawn by Hylacomylus and contained in this edition pre- 

 sents the first instance of the name of America " in the editions of Ptolemy's 

 Geography:" but in the meanwhile, according to my investigations, there had 

 appeared two years earlier a Map of the World by Petrus Apianus, which was 

 inserted in Camer's edition of Soliuus, and a second time in the Vadian edition 

 of Mela, and which, like more modern Chinese maps, represents the Isthmus 

 of Panama broken through (Examen crit. T. iv. p. 99124 ; T. v. p. 168 

 176). It is a great error to regard the map of 1527 now in Weimar, ob- 

 tained from the Ebner library at Nuremberg, and the map of 1529 of Diego 

 Eibero, engraved by Giissefeld, as the oldest maps of the New Continent (Exa- 

 men crit. T. ii. p. 184 ; T. iii. p. 191). Vespucci had visited the coasts of 

 South America in 1499 (a year after Columbus's third voyage) in the expe- 

 dition of Alonso de Hojeda, in company with Juan de la Cosa, whose map. 

 drawn at the Puerto de Santa Maria in 1500 fully six years before Colum- 

 bus's death, was first brought to light by myself. Vespucci could not even 

 liave had any motive for feigning a voyage in 1497, for he, as well as Colum- 

 bus, was firmly persuaded until his death, that his discoveries were a part of 

 Eastern Asia. (Compare the better of Columbus, February 1502, tjp Pope 

 Alexander VI., and another, July 1 503, to Queen Isabella, Navarrete, T. i. 

 p. 304, T. ii. p. 280, and Vespucci's letter to Pier Francesco de' Medici in 

 Bandini's Vita e Lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, p. 66 and 83.) Pedro de Le- 



