Progress of maritime art.
It was in 1526 when the Spanish authorities thought that the time was fitting for making a sort of register of the progress of discovery and of the attendant cartographical advances. Nordenskiöld says that "from the beginning of the printing of maps the graduations of latitude and longitude were marked down in most printed maps, at least in the margin;" the most conspicuous example of omitting these being, perhaps, in the work of Sebastian Münster, at a period a little later than the one we have now reached.
Latitude and longitude.
In 1503 Reisch for the first time settled upon something like the modern methods of indicating latitude and longitude in the map which he annexed to his Margarita philosophica at Freiburg, though so far as climatic lines could stand for latitudinal notions, Pierre d'Ailly had set an example of scaling the zones from the equator in his map of 1410. The Spaniards, however, did not fall into the method of Reisch, so far as published maps are concerned, till long afterwards (1534).
Italian maps.
Up to the time when the Strassburg Ptolemy was issued, in 1513, the chief activity in map-making had been in Italy. The cartographers of that country got what they could from Spain, but the main dependence was on Portuguese sources, though the rivals of Spain were not always free in imparting the knowledge of their hydrographical offices, since we find Robert Thorne, in 1527, charging the Portuguese with having falsified their records. It is worthy of remark that no official map of the Indies was published in Spain till 1790.
SEBASTIAN MÜNSTER.
[From Reusner's Icones, 1590.]
Cartographical activity north of the Alps.
Map projections.