Terrestrial and celestial globes; their history and ... - 24grammata.com

Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.
matters geographical had its references to the parts of the
world newly found of which Ptolemy
had not known.
One of the first German geographers of the century, and
now justly famed as one of the most distinguished of the
period, was Martin Waldseemiiller (ca. 1470-1522 ca.),
whose name, according to the practice of the time, was
classicized as Hylacomylus/^ So significant was the influence
of Waldseemiiller in the mapping of the New World
that a somewhat detailed word concerning him may here
well be given. When Duke Rene of Lorraine (1451-1508)
became a patron of learning, with particular interest in
cosmography or geography, the cartographical studies of
the Germans began to have a place of far-reaching impor-
tance. It was under this enlightened duke that the little
town of St. Die became a center of culture. Here was
organized the Vosgian Gymnasium, '^ a society of learned
men not unlike the Platonic Academy of Florence or the
Danubian Society, Vienna. Of this St. Die coterie none
was more prominent than Jean Bassin de Sandacourt,^'^
the translator of the 'Four Voyages' of Amerigo Vespucci
from the French into the Latin, Lud, the ducal secretary
and author of an important little work of but few pages,
which he called 'Speculi orbis succinciss . . . ,'*^ and
Waldseemiiller, the professor of cosmography, the author
of the 'Cosmographiae Introductio . . . ,'^^ and a cartographer
of great skill, who, with Ringmann, planned and
carried well on toward completion, as early as 1507 or 1508,
an edition of Ptolemy, which in 1513 was printed in the
city of Strassburg.^* It probably was as early as 1505 that
the plan was under consideration for a new translation of
Ptolemy from the Greek into the Latin, and that thought
perhaps had its inspiration in the letters of Vespucci, in
which he gave an account of his four voyages, and in the
new chart which but recently had fallen into the hands of
Ringmann. These charts, says Lud, in his 'Speculum,' came
from Portugal, which, if true, leads one to the belief that
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