Laon globe.
It shows the equator, the tropics, the polar circle, in a latitudinal way; but the first meridian, passing through Madeira, is the only one of the longitudinal sectors which it represents. Behaim had in this work the help of Holtzschner, and the globe has come down to our day, preserved in the town hall at Nuremberg, one of the sights and honors of that city. It shares the credit, however, with another, called the Laon globe, as the only well-authenticated geographical spheres which date back of the discovery of America. This Laon globe is much smaller, being only six inches in diameter; and though it is dated 1493, it is thought to have been made a few years earlier,—as D'Avezac thinks, in 1486.
THE ACTUAL AMERICA IN RELATION TO BEHAIM'S GEOGRAPHY.
Clements K. Markham, in a recent edition of Robert Hues' Tractatus de Globis, cites Nordenskiöld as considering Behaim's globe, without comparison, the most important geographical document since the atlas of Ptolemy, in A. D. 150. "He points out that it is the first which unreservedly adopts the existence of antipodes; the first which clearly shows that there is a passage from Europe to India; the first which attempts to deal with the discoveries of Marco Polo. It is an exact representation of geographical knowledge immediately previous to the first voyage of Columbus."
The Behaim globe has become familiar by many published drawings.
Toscanelli's map.
It has been claimed that Columbus probably took with him, on his voyage, the map which he had received from Toscanelli, with its delineation of the interjacent and island-studded ocean, which washed alike the shores of Europe and Asia, and that it was the subject of study by him and Pinzon at a time when Columbus refers in his journal to the use they made of a chart.
That Toscanelli's map long survived the voyage is known, and Las Casas used it. Humboldt has not the same confidence which Sprengel had, that at this time it crossed the sea in the "Santa Maria;" and he is inclined rather to suppose that the details of Toscanelli's chart, added to all others which Columbus had gathered from the maps of Bianco and Benincasa—for it is not possible he could have seen the work of Behaim, unless indeed, in fragmentary preconceptions—must have served him better as laid down on a chart of his own drafting. There is good reason to suppose that, more than once, with the skill which he is known to have possessed, he must have made such charts, to enforce and demonstrate his belief, which, though in the main like that of Toscanelli, were in matters of distance quite different.