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

Second Quarter of the Sixteenth Century.
not completed during his hfetime, though but four months
after his death, in the year 1594, Rumold Mercator pub-
Hshed his father's collection of maps, adding a third part
to those which previously had been issued. It was this publication
which bore the title 'Atlas sive cosmographicae medi-
tationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura.' Apparently
for the first time the term "atlas" had here been employed
for a collection of maps, a term which we know had its
origin with Gerhard Mercator himself. A reference to his
general cartographical work more detailed than the above
cannot here find place. It is his globes which call for special
consideration.
There is reason for thinking it was Nicolas Perrenot, father
of Cardinal Granvella, who suggested to Mercator the construction
of a globe; it at least was to this great Prime Min-
ister of the Emperor Charles V that he dedicated his first
work of this character, a terrestrial globe dated 1541.^'' That
Mercator had constructed such a globe had long been known
through a reference in Ghymmius' biography, yet
thought, until 1868, that none of the copies of this work
had come down to us. In that year there was offered for
it had been
sale, in the city of Ghent, the library of M. Benoni-Verelst
and among its treasures was a copy of Mercator' s engraved
globe gores of the year 1541, which were acquired by the
Royal Library of Brussels, where they may still be found.
Soon thereafter other copies of these gores, mounted and
unmounted, came to light in Paris, in Vienna, in Weimar,
in Niirnberg, and later yet other copies in Italy, until at
present no less than twelve copies are known.
These gores were constructed to cover a sphere 41 cm. in
diameter, and the map represents the entire world, with its
seas, its continents, and its islands. The names of the various
regions of the earth, of the several empires, and of the
oceans are inscribed in Roman capital letters; the names of
the kingdoms, of the provinces, of the rivers, are inscribed
in cursive Italic letters, while for the names of the several
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