10 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
the latitude of Judea ; but now, owing to precessional change, they can 
only be seen in a like striking manner from a latitude about 12° further 
south. 
The words of Dante have unquestionably originated the wonderful 
net of poetic fancy that has been woven about the asterism, which we 
now call Crux. 
To the right hand I turned, and fixed my mind 
On the other pole attentive, where I saw 
Four stars ne’er seen before save by the ken 
Of our first parents—Heaven of their rays 
Seemed joyous. O thou northern site! bereft 
Indeed, and widowed, since of these deprived. 
All the commentators agree that Dante here referred to the stars of the 
Southern Cross. 
Had Dante any imperfect knowledge of the existence of these stars, 
any tradition of their visibility from European latitudes in remote 
centuries, so that he might poetically term them the stars of our first 
parents ? 
Ptolemy catalogues them as 31, 32, 33, and 34 Centauri, and they 
are clearly marked on the Borgian globe described by Assemanus in 
1790. This globe was constructed by an Arabian in Egypt: it bears 
the date 622 Hegira, corresponding with A.p. 1225, and it is possible that 
Dante may have seen it. 
Amerigo Vespucci, as he sailed in tropical seas, apparently recognised 
in what we now call Crux the four luminous stars of Dante ; for in 1501 
he claimed to be the first European to have looked upon the stars of our 
first parents. His fellow-voyager, Andrea Corsali, wrote about the same 
time to Giuliano di Medici describing ‘the marvellous cross, the most 
glorious of all the celestial signs.’ 
Thus much mysticism and romance have been woven about this 
constellation, with the result that exaggerated notions of its brilliancy 
have been formed, and to most persons its first appearance, when viewed 
in southern latitudes, is disappointing. 
To those, however, who view it at upper culmination for the first 
time from a latitude a little south of the Canary Islands, and who at the 
same time make unconsciously a mental allowance for the absorption of 
light to which one is accustomed in the less clear skies of Northern 
Europe, the sight of the upright cross, standing as if fixed to the horizon, 
is a most impressive one. I at least found it so on my first voyage to 
the Cape of Good Hope. But how much more strongly must it have 
appealed to the mystic and superstitious minds of the early navigators as 
they entered the unexplored seas of the northern tropic! To them it 
must have appeared the revered image of the Cross pointing the way 
on their southward course—a symbol and sign of Hope and Faith on 
their entry to the unknown. 
The first general knowledge of the brighter stars of the southern 
