676 COSMOS. 



closely bears upon the intellectual and moral influences exer- 

 cised on the improvement of the social condition of mankind 

 by the sudden enlargement of the accumulated mass of new 

 ideas. We would simply draw attention to the fact, that since 

 this period, a new and more vigorous activity of the mind and 

 feelings, animated by bold aspirations and hopes which can 

 scarcely be frustrated, has gradually penetrated through all 

 grades of civil society ; that the scanty population of one-half 

 of the globe, especially in the portions opposite to Europe, 

 has favoured the settlements of colonies, which have been 

 converted by their extent and position into independent 

 states, enjoying unlimited power in the choice of their mode 

 of free government; and finally that religious reform the 

 precursor of great political revolutions could not fail to pass 

 through the different phases of its development in a portion 

 of the earth which had become the asylum of all forms of 

 faith, and of the most different views regarding divine things. 

 The daring enterprise of the Genoese seaman is the first link 

 in the immeasurable chain of these momentous events. 

 Accident, and not fraud and dissensions, deprived the 

 continent of America of the name of Columbus.^ The 



* I have shown elsewhere how a knowledge of the period at which 

 Yespucci was named royal chief pilot, alone refutes the accusation first 

 brought against 'him by the astronomer Schoner, of Nuremberg, in 1533., 

 of having artfully inserted the words "Terra di Amerigo" in charts 

 which he altered. The high esteem which the Spanish court paid to the 

 hydrographical and astronomical knowledge of Amerigo Vespucci, is 

 clearly manifested in the instructions (Real titulo con extensas facul- 

 tades) which were given to him when he was appointed piloto mayor, on 

 the 22nd of March, 1508. (Navarrete, t. iii. pp. 297-302.) He was 

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

 for the Casade Contratacion in Seville, (the central point of all oceanic 

 expeditions,) a general description of coasts and account of positions, 

 (Padron general) in which all new discoveries were to be annually entered. 

 But even as early as 1507, the name of "Americi terra" had been proposed 

 for the new continent, by a person whose existence even was undoubtedly 

 unknown to Vespucci, the geographer Waldsee-muller (Martinus Hyla- 

 comylus) of Freiburg, in the Breisgau, (the director of a printing 

 establishment at St. Die in Lorraine,) in a small work intitled Cosmo- 

 graphics Introductio, insuper quatuor Americi Vespucii Navigationes 

 (impr. in oppido S. Deodati, 1507). Ringmann, professor of cosmo- 

 graphy at Basle, (better known under the name of Philesius) Hyla- 

 comylus, and Father Gregorius Eeisch, who edited the Margarita 



