644 COSMOS. 



nourishment of the greater portion of mammalia, birds, and 

 reptiles ; but it is nevertheless, in accordance with the existing 

 laws of organic life, a beneficent arrangement, and a necessary 

 condition for the preservation of all living beings inhabiting 

 continents. 



When at the close of the fifteenth century a keen desire was 

 awakened for discovering the shortest route to the Asiatic spice 

 lands, and when the idea of reaching the east by sailing to the 

 west simultaneously awoke in the minds of two intellectual men 

 of Italy, the navigator Christopher Columbus, and the phy- 

 sician and astronomer Paul Toscanelli,* the opinion esta- 

 blished in Ptolemy's Almagest still prevailed, that the old 

 continent occupied a space extending over 180 equatorial 

 degrees from the western shore of the Iberian peninsula to 

 the meridian of eastern Sinae, or that it extended from east 

 to west over half of the globe. Columbus, misled by a long- 

 series of false inferences, extended this space to 240 degrees, 

 and in his eyes the desired eastern shores of Asia appeared 

 to advance as far as the meridian of San Diego in New 

 California. He therefore hoped that he should only have to 

 sail 120 degrees, instead of the 231 degrees at which the 

 wealthy Chinese commercial city of Quinsay is actually situ- 

 ated to the west of the extremity of the Spanish penin- 

 sula. Toscanelli, in his correspondence with the Admiral, 

 diminished the expanse of the fluid element in a manner 

 still more remarkable and more favourable to his designs. 

 According to his calculations, the extent of the sea between 

 Portugal and China was limited to 52 degrees, so that in 

 conformity with the expression of the prophet Esdras, six- 

 sevenths of the earth were dry. Columbus, at a subsequent 

 period, in a letter which he addressed to Queen Isabella from 

 Haiti, immediately after the completion of his third voyage, 

 showed himself the more inclined to these views, because they 



* Paolo Toscanelli was so greatly distinguished as an astronomer, that 

 Behaim's teacher, Regiomontanus, dedicated to him, in 1463, his 

 work De Quadratura Circuli, directed against the Cardinal Nicolaus de 

 Cusa. He constructed the great gnomon in the church of Santa Maria 

 Novella at Florence, and died in 1482, at the age of 85, without having 

 lived long enough to enjoy the pleasure of le^ rr> dng the discovery of the 

 Cape of Good Hops by Diaz, and thrt of tjui tropical part of the new 

 continent by Columbus. 



