German Geographers and German Geography 325 



of the Great Elector one hundred years 

 later to found colonies on the coast of 

 Guinea ; and so the era which laid the 

 foundation of the naval and commercial 

 power of all the states of western Europe 

 proved to be the ruin of that of Ger- 

 many, since the lines of trade which had 

 enriched it were now forsaken and the 

 new ones were for her unattainable. 



But so strong was the vitalitj^ of the 

 geographical spirit in Germany that 

 even those sad times could not quite 

 overcome it. If the nation could not 

 help being cut off from the actual pro- 

 gress of discover}', it could partake in it 

 mentally. The eyes of German ob- 

 servers followed the navigators and ex- 

 plorers to the unknown lands across the 

 sea ; the}^ listened to the reports that 

 came from there, and wrote them down 

 and printed and propagated them, and 

 it seems that through all the epoch of 

 the discoveries books of voyage and 

 travel were in no country read more 

 eagerly than in Germany. Peddlers sold 

 thousands of pamphlets dealing with 

 true and false stories of the fabulous 

 countries of the West, and German 

 Landsknechte left their homes and sold 

 their services to the Spaniard and the 

 Portuguese in order to get there. One 

 of these men, Ulrich Schmiedel, wrote 

 an account of his American experiences 

 which to this day is one of the most in- 

 teresting sources for facts relating to the 

 state of South America at the times of 

 the conquest. 



DAWN OF MODERN GEOGRAPHY 



With this elementary interest another 

 and a higher interest went hand in hand. 

 From the standpoint of natural curiosity 

 which delights in the strange unknown, 

 attention soon passed to the examina- 

 tion of the facts related, to the putting 

 together and comparing of the different 

 reports, to the distinguishing of what was 

 true or false, important or unimportant, 

 to the arranging and classifying of the 



results obtained. Undisturbed by ma- 

 terial and dynastic interests which in the 

 conquering countries directed attention 

 toward certain parts of the world, to the 

 neglect of the rest, this quiet progress 

 found in Germany the best conditions 

 for development, and thus, while the 

 conquistadores enriched their countries 

 with gold and silver, the German geog- 

 raphers found treasures of another kind 

 in discovering, or rather rediscovering, 

 the scientific conception of the earth's 

 face, the application to the enlarged 

 cosmographical horizon of the scientific 

 geographic methods of antiquity. In 

 one word, they found the spirit of mod- 

 ern scientific geography. It was in 

 Germany that the first globes and charts 

 of the world were made, that in conse- 

 quence of this a thorough reform of map- 

 drawing and projection took place, that 

 the idea of the atlas was first conceived 

 and realized, that the first modern de- 

 scriptions of the world, and the first 

 systematic handbooks of general and 

 physical geography were printed. 



BEHAIM 



The Bavarian, Johannes Miiller, 

 known better as Regiomontanus (after 

 his native city, Konigsberg in Franco- 

 nia), first thought of constructing an 

 earth's globe toward the end of the fif- 

 teenth century ; the idea was carried 

 out by one of his countrymen, Martin 

 Behaim, of Nuremberg. Behaim, one 

 of the few Germans who took an active 

 part in the great discoveries, had ac- 

 companied Diego Cao on his voj^age to 

 the west coast of Africa in i484-'85, and 

 after his return made the famous globe 

 still preserved in the ' ' Germanische 

 Museum ' ' at Nuremberg, which has 

 brought down to our days the image of 

 how the world was conceived in the 

 scientific mind immediately before the 

 discovery of America, for the globe 

 was finished in 1492, a few months be- 

 fore the arrival of Columbus at the land 



