which aron 'ordenskild hs written s follows to Sir Clements

5Iarkham :

"The globe of Behaim is, without comparison, the most imp.rtant geographical document that appeared between z.r. 150, the date of the comp,sition of Polemy's Atlas, and ,x.r. 1507, when Ruysch's n:tp of the world was published. This globe is no ,rely the oldest known to exist, hut, from its size and its wealth of geogral,hical detail, it l:ar surlasd all analogous monuments & #,;o[iral)]b ', until the ap- pearance of the gl,,be of lercat, a'. It is the first geographical document which, without. any reserve, adopts the existence of antipode It is the first which plainly shows the pos- sibilityof a passage byseatoh,dia and Cathay. It is the firs on which the disvries of Marco Polo are clearly indicated. It is true that the Behaim gh,be may he saia to have been l,receded, in st,me respects, %, s, ane oher earlier maps of the fifteenth centuryfr instance, the ins I, in a codex ,,f P,,ml,onius Mela

CROSS-STAFF. ,,f 1427, in the library of Rheims, (From Daris's'eaman's &c'ts,' Lon&n. 15tl4.) and that of Fra MaUlS. But if these are impartially ?tudied, it will be 5,und that they are based on the idea of Holner, that the earth is a large circular island encompassed by the ocean, a conception totally incompatible with the new geographical discoveries of the Spaniards. These and analogous maps are, thel-etbre, not in the slightest degree c, mq,arable with the gh,he of Behaim, which may be said to be an exact ll,resentati,,n of the geogral, hicM ku,,wledge of the peri,,d immediately preceding the first voyage of Cohtmhus." The ascertaining of the 1ontude continued for many generations to be a diculty, although 5Verner of -tirnberg pro,posed the method of observing the distance of the moon from the sun with simultaneous altitndesa method subsequently ]tnown as taking a "lunar"; and Gemres Frisius of LouvMn had an idea, made public in 1530, that lontnde might be found hy comparison of times kept by small clks, a foresha(lowing of the modern use of

the chronometer. Columbus was the first to observe the variation of the needle. This was on September 14th, 1492. It afterwards attracted the attention of Sebastian Cabot. ut the peculiarity was very generally believed at the time to be non-existent, the observations being incm'ate; and, as late as 1571, Sanniento doubted it. (;lobes, and not charts, were chiefly used by the early sixteenth-