The bibliographical list appended is full, but completeness is not pretended. Practically all of the works cited have been consulted, and care has been taken to include those held to be of the greatest importance. It will at least serve as a working list for those students who may wish to make further investigations within the field under consideration.
An expression of sincerest thanks is here recorded to the very many librarians, directors of museums, and private individuals who have so graciously responded to requests for information concerning the globes belonging to their several collections. The privilege so readily conceded for photographing the several examples, and the time and trouble expended in having this work of reproduction well done, are nothing less than a striking evidence of the kindliest fraternal spirit existing among those engaged in scientific and literary pursuits the world over. To the requests presented even the antipodes have responded.
In concluding, the author might refer to his interest in globes as dating from his early boyhood days, when, in that country school in western Illinois, bearing the name Liberty, for it had been established in the first years of the Civil War, he studied his geography and indeed his astronomy lessons with the aid of a terrestrial globe and an orrery. Can it be that we have revised our educational methods so far in this country as practically to have eliminated the intelligent use of aids so valuable in the study of the branches which globes concern? They enter in fact but little into modern methods of instruction. If this work could be made to encourage their extensive use, and serve in their rehabilitation as aids of inestimable interest and value in geographical and astronomical studies, it will have served the purpose which is most pleasing to the author.
Chapter I
Terrestrial Globes in Antiquity
The beginnings of astronomical and of geographical science.—Primitive attempts at map construction, as seen in the Babylonian plan of the world.—Anaximander probably the first scientific cartographer.—Statements of Herodotus.—The place of Hecataeus, Hipparchus, Marinus, Ptolemy.—The Romans as map makers.—The earliest beliefs in a globular earth.—Thales, the Pythagoreans, Aristotle.—Eratosthenes and his measurements of the earth.—Crates probably the first to construct a terrestrial globe.—Statements of Strabo.—Ptolemy’s statements concerning globes and globe construction.—The allusions of Pliny.
THE beginnings of the science of astronomy and of the science of geography are traceable to a remote antiquity. The earliest records which have come down to us out of the cradleland of civilization contain evidence that a lively interest in celestial and terrestrial phenomena was not wanting even in the day of history’s dawning. The primitive cultural folk of the Orient, dwellers in its great plateau regions, its fertile valleys, and its desert stretches were wont, as we are told, to watch the stars rise nightly in the east, sweep across the great vaulted space above, and set in the west as if controlled in their apparent movement by living spirits. To them this exhibition was one marvelous and awe-inspiring. In the somewhat strange grouping of the stars they early fancied they could see the forms of many of the objects about them, of many of their gods and heroes, and we find their successors outlining these forms in picture in their representations of the heavens on the material spheres which they constructed. Crude and simple, however, were their astronomical theories relative to the shape, the structure, and the magnitude of the great universe in which they found themselves placed.[1]
Then too, as stated, there was something of interest to the people of that early day in the simple problems of geography; problems suggested by the physical features of their immediate environment; problems arising as they journeyed for trade or traffic, or the love of adventure, to regions now near, now remote. Very ancient records tell us of the attempts they made, primitive indeed most of them were, to sketch in general outline small areas of the earth’s surface, usually at first the homeland of the map maker, but to which they added as their knowledge expanded. The early Egyptians, for example, as we long have known, made use of rough outline drawings (Fig. [1])[2] to represent certain features of special sections of their country, and recently discovered tablets in the lower Mesopotamian valley (Fig. [2]) interestingly show us how far advanced in the matter of map making the inhabitants of that land were two thousand years before the Christian era.[3] We are likewise assured, through references in the literature of classical antiquity, that maps were made by the early Greeks and Romans, and perhaps in great numbers as their civilization advanced, though none of their productions have survived to our day. To the Greeks indeed belongs the credit of first reducing geography and map making to a real science.[4] No recent discovery by archaeologist or by historian, interesting as many of their discoveries have been, seems to warrant an alteration of this statement, long accepted as fact.