Solinus.
Vadianus.
1520. Apianus.
There was at this time a circle of geographers working at Vienna, reëditing the ancient cosmographers, and bringing them into relations with the new results of discovery. Two of these early writers thus attracting attention were Pomponius Mela, whose Cosmographia dated back to the first century, and Solinus, whose Polyhistor was of the third. The Mela fell to the care of Johann Camers, who published it as De Situ Orbis at Vienna in 1512, at the press of Singrein; and this was followed in 1518 by another issue, taken in hand by Joachim Watt, better known under the Latinized name of Vadianus, who had been born in Switzerland, and who was one of the earlier helpers in popularizing the name of America. The Solinus, the care of which was undertaken by Camers, the teacher of Watt, was produced under these new auspices at the same time. Two years later (1520) both of these old writers attained new currency while issued together and accompanied by a map of Apianus,—as the German Bienewitz classicized his name,—in which further iteration was given to the name of America by attaching it to the southern continent of the west.
A strait at the Isthmus of Panama.
1515. Schöner.
Antarctic continent.
In this map Apianus, in 1520, was combining views of the western hemisphere, which had within the few antecedent years found advocacy among a new school of cartographers. These students represented the northern and southern continents as independent entities, disconnected at the isthmus, where Columbus had hoped to find his strait. This is shown in the earliest of the Schöner globes, the three copies of which known to us are preserved, one at Frankfort and two at Weimar. It is in the Luculentissima Descriptio, which was written to accompany this Schöner globe of 1515, where we find that statement already referred to, which chronicles, as Wieser thinks, an earlier voyage than Magellan's to the southern strait, which separated the "America" of Vespucius from that great Antarctic continent which did not entirely disappear from our maps till after the voyage of Cook.
1515. Reisch.
Brazil.