COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

644 COSMOS.
nourishment of the greater portion of mammalia, birds, and
reptiles ; but it is nevertheless, in accordance with the existing
laws of organic life, a beneficent arrangement, and a necessary
condition for the preservation of all
living beings inhabiting
continents.
When at the close of the fifteenth century a keen desire was
awakened for discovering the shortest route to the Asiatic spice
lands, and when the idea of reaching the east by sailing to the
west simultaneously awoke in the minds of two intellectual men
of Italy, the navigator Christopher Columbus, and the physician
and astronomer Paul Toscanelli,* the opinion esta-
blished in Ptolemy's Almagest still prevailed, that the old
continent occupied a space extending over 180 equatorial
degrees from the western shore of the Iberian peninsula to
the meridian of eastern Sinae, or that it extended from east
to west over half of the globe. Columbus, misled by a long
series of false inferences, extended this space to 240 degrees,
and in his eyes the desired eastern shores of Asia appeared
to advance as far as the meridian of San Diego in New
California. He therefore hoped that he should only have to
sail 120 degrees, instead of the 231 degrees at which the
wealthy Chinese commercial city of Quinsay is actually situated
to the west of the extremity of the Spanish peninsula.
Toscanelli, in his correspondence with the Admiral,
diminished the expanse of the fluid element in a manner
still more remarkable and more favourable to his designs.
According to his calculations, the extent of the sea between
Portugal and China was limited to 52 degrees, so that in
conformity with the expression of the prophet Esdras, sixsevenths
of the earth were dry. Columbus, at a subsequent
period, in a letter which he addressed to Queen Isabella from
Haiti, immediately after the completion of his third voyage,
showed himself the more inclined to these views, because they
* Paolo Toscanelli was so greatly distinguished as an astronomer, that
Behaim's teacher, Kegiomontanus, dedicated to him, in 1463, hi3
work De Quadratures Circuit, directed against the Cardinal Nicolaus de
Cusa. He constructed the great gnomon in the church of Santa Maria
Novella at Florence, and died in 1482, at the age of 85, without having
lived long enough to enjoy the pleasure of learning the discovery of the
Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, and that of the tropical part of the new
continent by Columbus.