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Map




MAP.

1. First Essays in Map-making.—As each man stands in the centre of his horizon and the portion of the earth's surface which lies within his range of vision has the appearance of a disk, the whole world was in ancient times conceived as a disk surrounded by the sea. It was con-sequently not uncommon for a people to imagine-—as was the case we know with the Chinese, the Hindus, the Chaldaeans, the Jews, the Arabs, and even the ancient Peruvians—that it occupied the middle part of the world. The wider a people's range of vision, the wider was the disk of the world represented. A circular surface is thus the simplest form for a mappa mundi or map of the world ; and it is met with both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. The extent of the circle of vision depends among uncivilized peoples on their way of life. Wandering tribes have seen more of the world than settled tribes; and hunters, fishers, and seamen make the widest excursions. Among them consequently we find the beginnings of map-making; and Eskimo, Indians, and Polynesians, for example, show in this matter astonishing quickness of apprehension, while among the settled Negro tribes, on the other hand, there are no maps. A map drawn by an Eskimo woman enabled Sir Edward Parry to discover Fury and Hecla Strait; M'Clintock during his endeavours to clear up the fate of the Franklin expedition repeatedly got the Eskimo to draw coast-maps of the Arctic lands; and many similar instances are given by Andree, " Begin-nings of Cartography," Globus, xxxi. pp. 24-27, 37-43.

Turning to civilized peoples, it is among the Egyptians that we find the earliest recorded examples of carto-graphic representation. Apollonius of Rhodes (born 230 B.C.) reports in his Argonautica (iv. 279) that the Egyptians of Colchis, a colony dating from the time of Ramses II. (?), had preserved as heirlooms certain wooden tablets (______) on which land and sea, roads and highways, were accurately indicated ; Eustathius, in his commentary on Dionysius Periegetes, mentions that Sesostris the Egyptian king caused route-maps to be prepared; and Strabo also refers to certain old maps in the library of Eratosthenes in which Meroe and the south end of the peninsula of India were placed on the same parallel of latitude. These statements have been confirmed by the actual discovery of such maps and plans on old Egyptian papyrus-rolls. Birch has, for instance, identified a drawing on a papyrus in the Turin Museum as the topographical map of a gold-mining district in Nubia. The perspective in this case is very childish : in order to show that the road leads between two mountain-chains, the mountains on one side of the road are inverted (comp. Lepsius, Urkun-denbuch, pi. xxii.). This map is one thousand years older than that of Anaximander, who was considered by the Greeks as the inventor of cartography. On another sheet appears a representation of the victorious return of Sethos I. (1443-1392 B.C.) from Asia, showing the road from Pelusium by Leontopolis to Heroopolis, Lake Timsah with fish in it, the canal from the Nile with crocodiles, and at Heroopolis a bridge over the canal. Similar picture-maps were discovered by Layard in Assyria (Nineveh and Babylon, p. 231 sq., 1867). The ancient Babylonians have also the high distinction of having divided space and time in a way that allowed scientific measurements to be made after the still customary method. It was they who origin-ated the division of the ecliptic into twelve signs and later into 360 degrees ; and the division of the circle into 360 degrees with 60 miuutes to the degree and 60 seconds to the minute, as well as the corresponding division of the hour, was the outcome of their sexagesimal system of numeration. This method of division was introduced among the Greeks by Hipparchus (150 B.C.), and obtained general currency through the geographer Ptolemy (150 A.D.). By this means were provided the elements necessary for the astro-nomical determination of geographical position. Among the Egyptians and Babylonians map-making remained in its first infantile stage; its scientific development was received at the hands of the Greeks.

2. Development of Map-making among the Greeks.— In Homer the " circumfluent ocean " represents the horizon which bounds the disk of the world; the scientific treat-ment of geography and map-making has its origin among the Ionic Greeks of Asia Minor. Anaximander, a pupil of Thales (about 560 B.C.), sketched the first map (______), and was the first who sought to deter-mine the compass of the earth (the world-disk) and the sea. As the Greeks gradually extended their journeys as far as India in the East and the Atlantic in the West, the con-viction gained ground that the world-disk could not be bounded by a regular circular outline. About one hundred years after Anaximander, Democritus of Abdera ventured to draw a new map on the basis of his own observations (for in his extensive wanderings he had been as far as Persia and perhaps even India); and in opposition to the circular form of the Ionians he gave the world an oblong shape, and taught that from east to west it was half as long again as from north to south. Although after the time of Aristotle the tabular or flat-surface theory of the figure of the earth was expelled by the spherical or globe theory, the portion of the earth's surface which was really known retained the same oblong shape which it had with Democritus ; and hence we still speak of longitude and latitude, that is, length and breadth. It was on this basis also that the far-travelled Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote his _____ between 520 and 500 B.C., drew up his map; for the representation of the world on a brazen tablet, which was shown by Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, to King Cleomenes of Sparta, was probably nothing else than the world-map of Hecatams. The first application of astronomy to geography was made by the famous Arctic navigator Pytheas of Marseilles, about 326 B.C. ; it is from him that we obtain the first observation of latitude, and, what is of some importance, this is for Marseilles. His voyage to the extreme North (Thule) was undertaken partly for the purpose of satisfying himself in regard to the figure and size of the earth. Dicaearchus of Messana in Sicily, a pupil of Aristotle's (310 B.C.), made the first approach td a projection. He divided the inhabited (i.e., the known) world, which he reckoned to be one and a half times as long as it was broad, into a northern and a southern half by means of what he considered a straight line drawn from the pillars of Hercules, through Sicily, the Peloponnesus, Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, and across the Taurus to the Imaus (Himalaya). He thus drew the first parallel of latitude, and upon this basis he prepared maps which were to be publicly exhibited in a hall (Agathem., § 5; Strabo, p. 105). The name ________, i.e., partition of the inhabited world, was given to the base-line. For the next material improvement we are indebted to the famous astronomer and geographer Eratosthenes of Cyrene, tho keeper of the Alexandriau library (276-196 B.C.). He was the first to make a rational geodetic measurement for the purpose of determining the size of the earth, and he col-lected in his recoypcte^iKa the whole geographical learning of his time. This work has unfortunately been lost, but from the numerous fragments that have been preserved, especially by Strabo, it is possible to form an idea of this the first systematic geography. Starting with the spherical form and the size of the world, it gave a descrip-tion of the o'lKovfievr], discussed the space relations of the world-island, and estimated its extent in longitude and latitude. On the basis of the diaphragm of Dicae-archus, the course of which was more precisely indicated, a series of seven parallels and as many meridians cutting the diaphragm at right angles were drawn, and by this means the inhabited world was divided to the north and the south of the diaphragm into a certain number of regular divisions to which the name of sphragidia or seals was given. Then follows a description of the countries in the several "seals," beginning with India. In this arrangement we may recognize the first attempt to con-struct a network or system of degrees. As numerous data in regard to distances were already at his command, Eratosthenes greatly improved on the old maps in the matter of correctness; but, as the number of astronomical determinations of latitude was still small, and the intervals between the parallels and the meridians were unequal and conditioned by the available data in regard to distance, his network of lines was far from being an exact mathematical system. Hipparchus of Nicsea in Bithynia, the greatest astronomer of the ancient world (about 150 B.C.), consequently rejected the geography of Eratosthenes because it only partially utilized the abundant resources provided by the high development of contemporary mathe-matics and astronomy. Instead of the uncertain estimates of distance and direction furnished by travellers, only astronomical determinations of latitude and longitude should, he maintained, have been employed. He does not appear, however, to have himself written a geo- ^nrx graphy or constructed a map. About the same HH time Crates of Mallus made the first globe. On this he extended the Atlantic Ocean southward to lg' the south pole, placed a corresponding ocean on the other hemisphere, and, in the belief that the torrid zone could be occupied by nothing but water, ran an Oceanic belt along the line of the equator (fig. 1), In the four segments thus produced he set four semicircular land-areas, only one of which was known to the ancient world. This systematic figure maintained its place down into the Middle Ages, as appears from the ornamentation of the globe that forms part of the insignia of royalty.

Marinas of Tyre (about 150 A.D.) was the first who sought to give effect to the demand made by Hipparchus for a trustworthy representation of the countries of the world. His work unfortunately has been lost; and we know of its existence only from his successor Claudius Ptolemy. Without Marinus, however, Ptolemy's work would have been impossible; and neither of them was able really to carry out Hipparchus's idea of determining the latitude and longitude for every place; for observa-tions of latitude were known only for Marseilles, Syene, Alexandria, Rhodes, and perhaps a few other places, and all other positions were obtained by reducing distances to degrees. The determination of longitudes was even more difficult. Ptolemy possessed only the contemporary observation of the lunar eclipse in Arbela and Carthage of the year 331 B.C., from which he calculated a dif-ference of meridian of 45° 10' instead of 34° 2'. The longer axis of the Mediterranean was consequently a third too great, 62 degrees of the meridian being assumed instead of 41 f, and from this there resulted an exaggera-tion of all the Mediterranean countries, which was corrected only by the compass-map3 of the later Middle Ages. Ptolemy, however (availing himself of the stereographic projection devised by Hipparchus), corrected an important blunder which Marinus had committed through neglecting to take account of the sphericity of the earth and con-structing a rectangular system of degrees. Like Marinus, he counted his meridians from the Canaries (the Fortunate Islands). No maps appear to have been drawn by Ptolemy himself; those to be found in the oldest editions of his work are by Agathodaemon (a mathematician of the 5th (?) century after Christ), though accurately based, it is true, on Ptolemy's data. The oldest MS. of Ptolemy is that found in the Vatopedi monastery of Mount Athos, and published by Victor Langlois in 1867 along with careful reproductions of the maps. It dates from the 12th or 13th century. Besides the exaggeration of the Mediterranean, the greatest blunders of Ptolemy are the following:—tile European continent between the Black Sea and the Baltic is too narrow; India is not represented as a peninsula; Ceylon (Taprobane) is made much too large; and the Indian Ocean is bounded by lands towards the south (Plate VII.). But in spite of all this the scientific method pursued in the representation was perfectly correct. It was not till the Renaissance that a return was made to the rational treat-ment of cartography inaugurated by Ptolemy; and he then became the teacher of the modern world.

3. Map-making among the Romans.—The Romans con-tributed nothing to the development of the scientific method of the Greeks, and did not apply astronomy to the purposes of cartography. They valued maps according to their practical utility as implements of political administration ; and they accordingly attached most importance to the route-map, from which they could learn the roads, the stations, and the distances. If we may judge by the few examples which have been preserved, these sketches may, distortions apart, be compared with our railway maps. Cicero and Seneca mention general and topographical maps. In their time the military routes were already divided into stages, furnished with milestones, and consequently measured. During the reign of Augustus a survey of the whole Roman empire was carried ont. The routes were marked on parchment rolls for the purposes of military and civil administration. A map of the world was painted in a portico at Rome; a map of Italy was to be seen in the temple of Tellus. Particularly celebrated was Agrippa's map. Pliny must plainly have been in possession of maps to keep himself right in regard to the great number of names which he records. A map of the Roman empire was drawn up under Domitian. The emperors of the 2d, 3d, and 4th centuries caused maps to be constructed and painted on the walls of public buildings in the cities of Gaul, as for example in Augustodunum (Autun); but of this class unfortunately none has been preserved. The only Roman map, indeed, of the imperial epoch which has come down to us is the Tabula Peutingeriana, which takes its modern name from Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg, who possessed it in the 16th century. It is now preserved in the Imperial Library of Vienna. Its origin as a map goes back at least to the 3d century of the Christian era,— to the time, that is, of Alexander Severus; but the actual copy is not older than the 13th century. It consists of twelve folio sheets of parchment, which originally formed one long strip. It has been published by Scheyb (1753) and Mannert (1834), and in excellent facsimile by Desjardins (1869, &c). That the original of this remark-able map was of a circular shape has been satisfactorily proved, the pattern followed being that of the map of the world in the portico of the Campus Agrippse, which for centuries retained the rank of a model. Probably, however, such an orbis pictus was not exactly round, but rather oval. In its construction effect was also given to the opinion current from the time of Herodotus that the extent of the inhabited world was greater from east to west than from north to south. From this it is clear that the Romans had not advanced beyond the earlier Greek con-ception, and were ignorant of the astronomico-mathematical method inaugurated by Hipparchus.

4. Map-making in the Middle Ages.—The scholastic Middle Ages confined themselves to imitation of the Roman orbes. Fulness of detail, moreover, was gradually lost, meagreness and crudity appearing in its place. Carto-graphy in fact fell back to a second childhood. Fanatical exponents of the orthodox faith, like Lactantius, looked with disdain on all scientific culture. Geographical ques-tions were of no interest to him because he regarded them as mere matters of opinion. Astronomy was a piece of fantastic folly, the knowledge of distant lands mere learned lumber. " Quae beatitudo," he exclaims, " erit mihi proposita si sciero unde Nilus oriatur vel quicquid de ccelo physici delirant ? " As this narrow conception of things became on the whole the dominant one, geography and map-making practically ceased to exist. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was placed under the ban of the church, and people went back to the Homeric idea of a disk sur-rounded by the ocean. Isidore of Seville (ob. 636) taught: " Orbis a rotunditate circuli dictus quia sicut rota est. Undique enim Oceanus circumfluens ejus in circulo ambit fines. Divisus est autem trifarie; e quibus una pars Asia, altera Europa, tertia Africa, qua? et Libya nuncupatur." Isidore is a master of false etymological inferences. Deriving rotunditas from rota, a wheel, he declares that consequently the earth has the appearance of a wheel. Hence the name wheel-maps has been given to all those maps of the earlier Middle Ages. The three-fold division which he gives of the world-disk kept its ground for cen-turies, and the figure of the earth put on the miserable guise shown in fig. 2. It was only by the Greek fathers that the doctrine of the earth's sphericity continued to be taught; and, as the knowledge of Greek rapidly died out in western Europe, the fountain was dried up from which a better science might have been derived. Many minor modifica-tions were introduced into the map of the world, but the fundamental type remained as given in fig. 2. Jerusalem lay in the centre, Paradise in the extreme east. Clever artists gave life to the disk of the world by turreted pictures of towns—Jerusalem, Troy, Babylon, Rome, &c, and drew Adam and Eve in the midst of a Paradise which was defended by a fence of thorns or of flames, and, being considered the highest place in the world, was always introduced at the top of the map ! The positions of Jerusalem and Paradise served to fix the other points. How long this conception remained in vogue appears from
Oriens.

Occidens. Fig. 2.

the fact that in 1422 Leonardo Dati, in a poem on the sphere {Delia Spera), wrote, "AT within an 0 shows the design" (TJn T dentre a uno 0 '/nostra il disegno), thus Q. In this way the whole science of cartography sank back below the level attained by the Ionian Greeks.





5. Map-making among the Arabians.—The first develop-ment of geographical science among the Arabs took place at Baghdad about 772 A.D., in the reign of the caliph Mansiir, and under the influence of an Indian astronomer and mathematician; and, not long after the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, and Ptolemy were translated into Arabic, by orders of the caliph Mamun (813-833), a degree was measured in Mesopotamia in the plain of Sinjar, and a system of the world (Rasm el-ard) was constructed by his librarian Mohammed ben Musa of Khiva (Alcharesmius), in which every place was to be determined by longitude and latitude in the style of Ptolemy. But the science split up only too soon into a practical and a theoretical (astronomical) section—the one treating geography (ja'rafiya) as the doctrine of routes and provinces, the other as the doctrine of latitudes and longitudes. Astronomy contented itself with the astronomical determination of the position of places without drawing maps or exerting any influence on their projection; travellers and topographers on the other hand did not trouble themselves about astronomy, but like Istakhri (c. 750) or Ibn Haukal (c. 750) added maps to their descriptions which were destitute of any system of degrees, and betrayed by the roughness of their outlines the clumsi-ness of the draughtsman. Ultimately, like Dimishkf (1327), they left mathematical geography completely out of their works, Ibn Haukal having already declared that mathemati-cal division only brought confusion into geography. Only Edrfsi's map, engraved for King Roger II. of Sicily upon a silver plate (1164), forms an exception; but, as it was not drawn according to the Ptolemaic projection, but simply indicated the seven climates, it was after all but an unsuc-cessful copy of Ptolemy.

6. Nautical Maps.—The nautical (loxodromic or compass) maps, which make their first appearance in Italy in the 13th century, indicate a gratifying improvement in cartography after a long period of stagnation. These maps were constructed with the aid of the compass, and took the name of compass-maps because they are covered with the figure of a compass from which numerous straight lines radiate out in all directions over the sheet. The fact that the magnet turns towards the north is first mentioned in 1187. Flavio Gioja of Amalfi was perhaps the first to make a mariner's compass and to teach seamen the use of that important instrument. The Italians divided the compass into eight parts (venti), assigning 45° to each— Tramontane (N.), Greco (N.E.), Levante (E.), Sirocco (S.E.), Ostro (S.), Libeccio or Garbino (S.W.), Ponente (W.), Maestro (N.W.). Every division had four quarters (quarte di vento), each of 11J degrees. The maps were produced as follows. The courses of individual ships were first of all inserted as straight lines, calculated according to the distances traversed, from particular ports, as Genoa or Venice, to other ports, and when a good supply of such material had been collected and a series of diagonals drawn in accordance therewith, the most important points on the coast and in the islands were fixed. The lines by which the meridians were cut at the same angle were called loxodromes; they gave a correct indication when they cut the true astronomical meridian, a false one when they cut the magnetic meridian. On the Italian charts the loxodromes were drawn as straight lines. The numerous radii of the compass shown on the maps enabled the seaman to find the direction which he had to take to reach his goal. Hence the title loxodromic maps.

Charts on which the degrees were marked became neces-sary only when navigation extended to the ocean; they were introduced by the Portuguese, probably at the sugges-tion of Prince Henry the Navigator. They are " plane charts " with lines of longitude and latitude.

The oldest loxodromic charts which have been preserved come from Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The earliest, the so-called Pisan chart, belongs probably to the middle of the 13th century, and already comprises the whole Mediterranean. As this representation of the whole must of necessity have been preceded by surveys of the several portions, the beginning of the chart may be placed at least as far back as the first part of the 13th century. Next in point of age comes (2) the Luxoro Atlas in Genoa about the year 1300, in the possession of the Cavaliere Tomas Luxoro. Then follow (3) Petrus Vesconte, 1311, in the national archives at Florence, including the eastern Mediterranean (Petrus Vesconte de Janua fecit ista carta ann dfii M"OOOXI°), see fig. 3 ; (4) Marino Sanudo, a map of the world representing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts as far as Flanders, probably drawn between 1312 and 1321—several copies in Rome (the Vatican), Venice, and Brussels ; (5) an atlas of Petrus Vesconte's about 1318 (in Venice, in eight sheets; in Milan, ten sheets) ; (6) Perrinus Vesconte, 1327, in the Laurentian Library at Florence; (7) Joannes da Carignano, between 1306 and 1333, in the archives of Florence (PresMter Joannes rector sancti Marci deportu Januse me fecit); (8) a map of 1346 in the Castilian tongue, in the National Library at Paris ; (9) the Medicean atlas of 1351 in the Laurentian Library at Florence, eight sheets, which represents also the Caspian Sea, and, remarkable enough, the whole of Africa ; (10) Pizigani, 1367, in the National Library at Parma, a map of the world which extends as far as Persia, with numerous entries not only on the coasts but also in the interior; (11) an atlas of Pizigani, of date 1363, nine sheets in folio, in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, comprising the Mediterranean and the Ocean as far as Jutland (M.CGGLXXIII a die VIII di zugno franzescho piziganij veniziano in veniexia me fecit); (12) the famous Cata-lonian map of the world of 1375, in four sheets, in the National Library at Paris; (13) a map by Guill. Solerio of Majorca, 1385, in the public archives in Florence; and (14) atlas by some un-known hand, four sheets folio, in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice.

Several of these Italian maps give indubitable evidence that as early as the 14th century the Azores and Canaries had been disj covered, as well as the coast of Africa as far as beyond Cape Bojador. With the middle of the century the coast maps developed into maps of countries with trade routes, pictorial figures, and numerous inscriptions. Maps preserved from the 15th century are still more numerous :—(15) a map by the Venetian Nieolao, of date 1408, in Vienna; (16) Mecia de Villa destes, 1413, in the National Gallery at Paris ; (17) a map of the world of 1417, in the National Library at Florence ; (18) Francesco de Cesanis, 1421, in the Museo Correr at Venice ; (19) a map of 1424 at Weimar; (20) atlases by Gia-como de Giraldi, 1426-43, in Venice and Milan ; (21) Gabriel de Valsecqua, 1434, from'Majorca; (22) Francesco Beccario, three maps, in the British Museum; (23) two maps by Battista Beccario in Munich (1426) and Parma (1435) ; (24) Andrea Bianco, 1436, an atlas of ten sheets, where for the first time the mediawal circular maps are accompanied by the Ptolemaic maps, in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice ; also a map of 1448, drawn at London, now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan (Andrea Bianco venccian comito di galia me fexe a londra, 1448); (25) an elliptical map of the world in the Pitti Palace at Florence, of Genoese origin, and of date 1447 ; (26) Hannibal de Madiis, 1449, in the Ambrosian Library; (27) a Oatalonian map of the world, of 1450 (?), in the National Library at Florence ; (28) Giovanni Leardo, two maps of the world, of date 1448 (in the museum at Vicenza) and 1452 (the property of Consul-general von Pilat at Venice) ; (29) Fra Mauro, a famous map of the world from 1457-59 in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice ; (30) Gratioso Benincasa of Ancona, a diligent cartographer, twenty-five very carefully executed works dating from between 1460 and 1482 ; most of them are in Italy, chiefly at Venice, two in Paris, one at Munich, and one without date in the British Museum ; (31) Andrea Benincasa, son of the preceding, three maps of 1476 (Geneva) and 1490 (Ancona and Rome); (32) Bartolomeo Pareto, a map of the world, of 1455, at Rome ; (33) Giorgio Giovanni, 1484 (Parma); (34) Count Hortomanus Fredutius of Ancona, 1497 (Wolfenbiittel).

In the beginning of the 16th century, (35) Alberto Cantino, about 1501-3, was the first in Italy to draw a map representing portions of America, Carta da navigare per le Isole nuovamente trovate in la parte delle Indie, in the library at Modena. (36) The Maggiolo family, famous for its cartography, flourished in Genoa between 1511 and 1648. Visconte Maggiolo, the founder of the family, is known to have produced nineteen atlases between 1511 and 1587. A map by Giaeomo Maggiolo, of date 1562, is in the British Museum. (37) Battista Agnese laboured between 1527 and 1554 in Venice, and the thirteen atlases he has left behind him are pieces of fine artistic work adorned with charming miniatures. Two of these atlases, of date 1527 and 1536, are in the British Museum.





In the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, and French cartographers appear as competitors with the Italian, Catalonian, and Balearic artists. "We name only the most important. Juan de la Casa, a Basque, and a companion of Columbus, drew in 1500 a map of the world in which for the first time the hitherto discovered coasts and islands of America were introduced. A map of the world by Garcia de Torero, 1522, is preserved at Turin ; and two general maps, the one dating 1527 (probably by Fernando Colon, son of Columbus) arid the other 1529 (by Diego Ribero), exist at Weimar. Between 1558 and 1569 Diego Homem produced several beautiful atlases ; of these four are in Italy, and one, of date 1568, at Dresden. Among the French world-maps a special place is due to that drawn up by order of King Henry II. It is published by Jomard in his Monumens de la géographie.

As far as Italian navigation extended, and especially within the limits of the Mediterranean, a very correct representation of the coasts and of the contours of the several countries was secured at an early date. The interior of the countries, on the other hand, remained confused and inexact. These defects were first supplied in the 15th century, when recourse was again had to the contri-butions of the Greeks, and especially of Ptolemy.

Before proceeding to discuss this new development, it may be as well to mention the various names by which the representations of the earth's surface have been designated. The Greeks employed the expression _____ (picture), the Romans in like manner said tabula. The word map came into use in the Middle Ages, the namr mappa-mundi, mappemonde ("world-napkin"), proving that maps were originally painted on cloth. In English map is applied only to a land-map, the sea-map being known as a chart. The Romance languages had the expressions disegno, figura, pintura, padron. When the loxodromic maps came into existence, hand-books with sailing directions were written to accompany them, hence the titles " sailing directions," "sea-books," portulani (by which word actual maps were afterwards meant), or cartas da marear. The Latin word charta signifies originally a letter, a written document; and in like manner the Portuguese and Spanish form carta. But as early as the 14th century this expression was (as appears from the inscrip-tion quoted under No. 3 above) used to distinguish a sea-map. In the same sense Paolo Toscanelli speaks of his carta, which he sent to the king of Portugal. But the expression did not become general till the 16th century ; in 1513 we find it in Germany in a Strasburg edition of Ptolemy (Carta Marina Portugalensium), in 1524 in Spain (in the Junta of Badajoz), in 1582 in England (Michael Lock).

7. The Revival of Ptolemy.—This produced in the 15th century a revolution in the construction of maps, and laid the foundations of modern cartography. Ptolemy's great work again became generally well known in western Europe only after it was translated into Latin by Jacobus Ángelus de Scarparia in 1409 ; and this version was first printed in 1475 at Vicenza without maps. The first edition with maps (to wit, a map of the world, ten maps of Europe, four of Africa, and twelve of Asia) appeared at Borne in 1478. Afterwards there were editions at Bologna (1482), Ulm (1482, by Nicolaus Donis with five modern maps), Ulm (I486), Eome (1490, 1507, and 1508, the last with seven modern maps, among which the famous map of the world by Joh. Ruysch), Strasburg (1513, with forty-seven maps); and in the course of the same century twenty-five other editions might be mentioned at Strasburg, Basel, Lyons, Cologne, Venice, and Paris. From this long series, which if prolonged to the beginning of the Thirty Years' War would be further increased by five, it is evident that Ptolemy was the great master of the modern time. At first maps were drawn according to Ptolemy's determinations of geographical position; but, in proportion as the study of mathematics, astronomy, and cosmography excited the interest of men of culture, opportunities were afforded of correcting Ptolemy's astronomical positions, especially in the case of central and northern Europe, where the range of the great cosmographer's knowledge had hardly enabled him to collect original material. The new arts of wood and copper engraving supplied the means for a rapid diffusion of printed maps. The oldest map printed from a wooden block (in the National Library at Paris), dating from 1460, and thus belonging to the earliest period of wood engrav-ing, was produced in Germany, and represents Germany and western Europe. It is considered to be a copy from an old Roman map.

After the foundations of trigonometry had been laid by Purbach, Regiomontanus, and others, attempts of a rather rude kind were made in the beginning of the 16th century to execute geographical triangulations and delineations. The towns formed the central points of the system, their direction and position from the post of observation being fixed as precisely as possible, and their distance estimated in miles according to the best available data without being accurately measured. It was considered sufficient to assign in this way the relative positions of inhabited places, and the representation of the physical relations was very super-ficial ; the course of rivers, for instance, was not measured, but carried past the towns on their banks in conventional lines.

In the Ptolemy of 1513 we already find three topographical maps, viz., one of Switzerland, one of the district of the upper Rhine from Basel to Mainz and Lorraine, and a large one of Crete, which it has been conjectured was taken from a Venetian original. The number of maps of smaller districts rapidly increased. In 1528 Aventiuus drew the duchy of Bavaria, in 1533 Sebastian of Rotenhamm produced a map of East Franconia. Map drawing became a favourite occupation with the Germans. The best geographical survey of this period was the Chorographia Bavarise, by the famous Philip Apianus (twenty-four sheets, at Ingolstadt, 1568). The number of cartographers increased so rapidly that Abraham Ortelius, in the first edition of his collection of maps (Theatrum Mundi, 1570), was able to give the names of ninety-three. The first attempts to improve and to increase the methods of projection known to the Greeks were made by Germans,—namely, Johann Stoffler (1452-1536), Johann Werner of Nuremberg (1468-1528), Peter Apianus (1495-1552). The last-mentioned introduced the favourite method of representing both hemispheres together in an elliptical form with lines of latitude. Maps of the world were compiled by Peter Apianus. Oronce Finé (1494-1555), Sebastian Cabot (1544), Giacomo Gastaldo (1546-48), Giov. Batt. Guicciardini (1549), Giov. Domin. Methoni at Venice, Heinrich Pontanus o." Arnhem (1556, a map of the world in the shape of an imperial ea^e), Guill. Postel at Paris (1581), &c.

8. Mercator and his Successors.—Gerhard Kramer, usually called Mercator (born of German parents at Rupelmonde in Flanders in 1512), has the honourable place of a re-former of cartography. We possess his map of Palestine (1537), a map of Flanders (Louvain, 1540) in nine sheets, phototyped in 1882, a globe (1541), and the first critical map of Europe (1554), by which he laid the foundation of his fame as the first cartographer of his age. The exclusive use of Latin letters for maps in Germany was due to his example. Especially famous is his map of the world (fig. 4) dating from 1569: "Nova et aucta orbis terrse descriptio ad usum navi-gantium emendate accommodata" (one copy in the National Library at Paris). This map is drawn in the projection of increasing latitudes with lines of latitude and parallel meridians, the basis of which was furnished by Edward Wright in 1599 in Certain Errors in Naviga-tion. It is the first chart on which true rhumb lines could be drawn as straight lines. By 1601 Mercator's projection was in use for all sea charts. In 1578 Mercator drew up maps for Ptolemy exactly in accordance with his determinations; and these were followed by maps of Germany, the Low Countries, and France (1585), and of Italy (1590). It was his purpose to produce a complete collection of new maps, to which he gave the name Atlas > but he died in 1594, and the publication of this first atlas (1595) was left to his son. The title took the place of the designations previously in fashion-—Theatrum Orbis, Speculum Mundi, &c. The second edition of the Atlas appeared in 1602. The later editions were issued by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam.

Before Mercator collections of maps, including various countries, and independent of Ptolemy, had begun to be published. Thus Christoffel Froschover in Zurich issued various "Landtaflen" in 1562 —a map of the world (Universalis Cosmographia, in the shape of a heart, dated MD.XL.VI.), Europe, Germania, Gallia, "die gantzc Eydgnoschafft," and eight topographical maps of Swiss districts. Of much greater importance and influence was the collection pub-lished by Abraham Ortelius of Antwerp (1527-98), Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), in which the best maps from all countries were re-engraved. The first edition with a Latin text contained fifty-tlm e sheets; the seventh (1573) had sixty-nine maps, the twelfth (1579) ninety-two. Editions appeared with the text in German, French; Dutch, and after 1600 in English and Italian, and obtained the widest diffusion. Through this work the centre of cartographic activity was transferred to Holland. There too laboured the suc-cessors of Mercator, Jodocus Hondius (1563-1611) and his son Henrieus Hondius (1580-1644). Their maps, in several folio volumes, were numbered by hundreds. To the school of Mercator belonged also Petrus Plancius and Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer of Enkhuyzen (Aurigarius), who by his Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (Leyden, 1583) became the founder of nautical map-collections. In 1588 a re-production of this atlas appeared in London as the first'' Waggoner." In the beginning of the 17th century the town of Dieppe also pro-duced excellent charts,—Guill. Levasseur (1601), Jean Dupont(1625), and Jean Guerard (1631) being at work there. About the same time another famous cartographic family arose in Holland. William Jansz. Blaeu (1571-1638) and his sons Jan and Cornelis turned out about four hundred maps previous to 1655. William Blaeu was in 1633 appointed by public decree cartographer to the States-General; and it was his duty to examine the ships' logs and so amend the maps. He had a rival in the person of Jan Janszoon (Jansonius), who, working with the material inherited by him from his father-in-law Jodocus Hondius, produced a Dutch atlas in six volumes, a French in six folios, a German in nine folios, and a Latin in two. Cartography became a lucrative business, but the scientific value of the work grew less and less in the hands of Nicolaus Vischer (Piscator) from 1621 to 1670 and his son of the same name (ob. 1709), of Friedrich de Witt and his sons, and of Peter Sehenck. The in-fluence of the Dutch school, which had previously been so great, disappeared with the close of the 17th century.

In the 16th century the Italians were still active competitors with the Germans and Dutch. In engraved maps Venice held a specially high rank up to 1570, the Piedmontese Giacomo Gastaldo and Paolo Forlaui of Verona being settled there. Their publications com-prised well-nigh all parts of the earth. The progress of discovery can be followed on their general (universale) and topographical maps. Gastaldo's period of activity lay between 1546 and 1569, Forlani's between 1560 and 1570. They had a successor in Antonio Magiiii (1555-1617) of Padua, who in his Novse geogr. tabulse, pub-lished in 1596, gave greater precision to the determinations of position. Giovanni Battista Nicolosi (1610-70) of Sicily issued at Rome a series of huge maps of the hemispheres and continents. Among the French map-makers of this period must be mentioned Oronee Finé (Finaeus) from Dauphiné (1494-1555), who published in 1531 his Planisphserium geographicum in the shape of a heart according to the projection of Apianus ; Jolivet (about 1560); Guillaume Postel (1505-81), who in 1570 drew a new map of France; the Franciscan Andre Thevet (1502-90), who in 1575 edited a Oosmographie universe-lie (2 vols, in folio), and finally Melchior Tavernier, a pupil of Ortelius (ob. 1641), who published manymaps of European countries. InEngland thereappearedinl544 the great map of the world by Sebastian Cabot. The first modern map of England was produced by Humphrey Lhuyd in 1569 (Anglix regni tabula and GorograpMa Carnbrias). He was succeeded by Christopher Saxton, who travelled through different parts of the country with several engineers, and in 1575 gave to the world his British atlas of thirty-six sheets, which Philip Lea afterwards re-duced to twelve sheets. John Speed's atlas (Theatrum) of Great Britain was published at Amsterdam in 1610 by Jodocus Hondius. The first map of Scandinavia (Regnormn Aquiloniormn Descriptio) was produced in 1539 by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Upsala. Much more accurate was the map drawn by Adrian Veno in 1613, and engraved by Jodocus Hondius, but the real reformer of northern cartography was Anders Bure (Burseus, 1571-1646), who surveyed the several parts of the country. His maps were afterwards pub-lished in the atlas of the brothers Blaeu between 1650 and 1660.

The first new map of Spain and the first of Portugal both appeared in the same year, 1560, the former being due to Pedro de Medina, the latter to Fernando Alvarez Secco.

During all this period there prevailed a remarkable variety in the determination of the first meridian. Whilst the Spaniards and Portuguese reckoned from the line of demarcation (370 leagues west of the Cape Verds) sanctioned by the pope, the Protestant Dutch, Germans, and English at first went back to Ptolemy, who began at the Canaries. Mercator, on his globe of the year 1541, chose the island Forteventura in the Canaries as his starting-point, but he afterwards adopted Corvo in the Azores, because he there approached the true indication of the magnetic needle. For the same reason Ortelius, the younger Mercator, Jansonius, and at first also William Blaeu fixed on the Isla del Fuego in the Cape Verd group. Blaeu afterwards proposed the Peak of Teneriffe, and in this he was followed by all Dutchmen. In the year 1634 Richelieu consulted the astronomers Gassendi (1592-1655) and Morin (1583-1656), and in accordance with their decision Louis XIII. commanded, under penalty, that all French ships should calculate their longitudes from the meridian of Ferro, though it was not till the close of the 17th century that a French expedition determined with accuracy the relation of the position of Ferro to that of the observatory of Paris. It was in this way that the Ferro meridian obtained almost uni-versal currency down to the 19th century. As in this period it was still practically impossible to secure precise determinations of longi-tude, all cartographic representations were naturally subject to con-siderable distortions, especially in countries outside of Europe.

9. Period of Transition.—A series of important dis-coveries and inventions in mathematics, physics, and astro-nomy having provided the means of making much more accurate observations and calculations, there followed as a matter of course a substantial improvement in cartography. Of chief moment were the invention of the telescope (1606), Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons (1610) and Cassini's calculation of their periods of rotation, so important for determinations of longitude (1666), the first application of trigonometry to geodesy by Snellius (1615), Picard's measurement of a degree between Paris and Amiens (1669 and 1670), the French measurement of a degree between Dunkirk and Perpignan by Cassini and Lahire(1683-1718), Hadley's mirror-sextant (1731; according to Newton's idea, 1699), the improvements made on the lunar tables by Tobias Mayer (1753), and John Harrison's chronometer (1761). In this way there set in a period of transition in cartography which lasted till somewhere about 1750; the results of new investigations and measurements were gradually turned to account, but, while here and there traditional blunders were corrected and expunged, nothing essentially new was as yet created.

To this epoch in Germany belong Johann Baptist Homann, (1664-1724), whose elegantly engraved maps, published in Nurem-berg, continued to have a wide sale after his death, Johann Matthias Hase in Nuremberg {ob. 1743), and the famous Tobias Mayer (1723-86), who published in Nuremberg a critical map of Germany. In France eminence was obtained by Nicolas Sanson (1600-67) of Abbeville, who from 1627 worked at Paris as royal geographer, and issued more than three hundred maps ; and the reputa-tion of the house was maintained by his sons Nicolas, Adrien, and Guill. Sanson, who worked along with Hubert Jaillot (1681-1717), Pierre du Val (1619-83), and Jean Baptiste Nolin (1692) at the French book of charts, Neptune, francois, 1693, in which for the first time the new astronomical determinations were turned to account. Greater critical acumen was shown by the royal geo-grapher Guill. de l'lsle (1675-1726), and especially by the talented Jean Baptiste Bourgignon d'Anville (1697-1782) and his younger contemporary Philippe Buache (1700-1773). In this period France was facile princeps in cartographic achievements, and led the way to the next and latest epoch. In England Dowet's Atlas was published at the cost of the duke of Argyll, and in tho same year Aaron Arrowsmith was born (o!>. 1828). A beginning of geodetic labour was at this time made in Sweden under Charles XL,— the proceedings being carried on first under the Baron Karl Griep-enhielm (ob. 1684) and afterwards under Count Dahlberg. For political reasons, however, the king did not allow the publication of the map of Sweden; but, the French ambassador D'Avaux having in 1704 got possession of copies, it was engraved at Paris by De l'lsle. In Italy P. "Vincent Coronelli (ob. 1718) deserves to be mentioned.

10. The Period of Triangidations and Geodetic Surveys. —Up to this point the whole art of map-making had been treated as a matter of private speculation. It was France that gave the first example of carrying out the cartographic survey of the country at the cost of the state. Such surveys had a double object, one military, to provide the army with satisfactory maps, and the other administrative, to furnish a cadastre for the land tax. The military interest predominated; consequently the surveys have in almost all countries been carried out by officers of the general staff, and the maps are briefly designated as general staff or ordnance maps. For such a survey the whole country is covered with a network of triangles, and, in order to secure the most trustworthy basis for the representation, numerous points are astronomically fixed. In comparison with those of earlier date the maps thus produced are distinguished by correctness of detail. In the century between 1750 and 1850 attention was mainly directed to the accurate rendering of the horizontal development of the face of the country; but during the last thirty years the vertical con-figuration has also been faithfully represented on topo-graphical maps of large scale by the introduction of contour lines. The first example of this also was given by France, when at Laplace's suggestion (1816) it was determined to publish a new map of France with curves of altitude. But owing to the great extent of the country, and the con-sequent difficulty and slowness of the undertaking, only four sheets of this kind were published by 1833. Hanover, however, followed suit in 1829, Baden in 1833, Hesse in 18f0, and so on. Since the middle of last century nearly all the states of Europe have been active in map-making; and prolonged effort has produced rich results. Surveying and mapping have been followed by the publication of topographic maps. The states of the Balkan peninsula alone lag behind; there no comprehensive survey has been undertaken at public expense. As a summary of these great achievements in the larger part of Europe, we append a chronological1 table of the most important surveys, with the date of the publication of the first sheet, the name of the country, the title of the map, the scale, and the number of sheets. Outside of Europe there are but few countries in which a survey based on exact triangulation has been carried out. The largest areas thus measured are the United States of North America and British India, where great activity has been shown ; and to these may be added Asiatic Russia, portions of Australia, portions of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies, and Algeria. In the whole of South America there is only one country, Chili, of which we possess a map based upon a careful survey. In the second portion of the table consequently some maps are included which are merely the work of private carto-graphers, and the list must be regarded a.s tentative.

1 For convenience of comparison the different series for the British Isles are grouped together in the table in the place of the earliest date.

List of Topographic Maps.

== TABLE ==

(S. R.)



The above article was written by: Sophus Ruge, Ph.D.




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