Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia / being a concordance of choice tributes to the great Genoese, his grand discovery, and his greatness of mind and purpose

by Unknown

Fernando Herrera, Spanish poet, 1534-1597.

Many sighed and wept, and every hour seemed a year.

THE EFFECT OF THE DISCOVERY.

C. W. Hodgin, professor of history in Earlham College, Indiana. From "Preparation for the Discovery of America."

The discovery of America by Columbus stands out in history as an event of supreme importance, both because of its value in itself and because of its reflex action upon Europe. It swept away the hideous monsters and frightful apparitions with which a superstitious imagination had peopled the unknown Atlantic, and removed at once and forever the fancied dangers in the way of its navigation. It destroyed the old patristic geography and practically demonstrated the rotundity of the earth. It overthrew the old ideas of science and gave a new meaning to the Baconian method of investigation. It revolutionized the commerce of the world, and greatly stimulated the intellect of Europe, already awakening from the long torpor of the Dark Ages. It opened the doors of a new world, through which the oppressed and overcrowded population of the Old World might enter and make homes, build states, and develop a higher ideal of freedom than the world had before conceived.

But this event did not come to pass by accident, neither was it the result of a single cause. It was the culmination of a series of events, each of which had a tendency, more or less marked, to concentrate into the close of the fifteenth century the results of an instinct to search over unexplored seas for unknown lands.

COLUMBUS THE FIRST DISCOVERER.

Friedrich Heinrich Alexander, Baron Von Humboldt, the illustrious traveler, naturalist, and cosmographer. Born in Berlin, September 14, 1769; died there May 6, 1859. He has been well termed "The Modern Aristotle."

To say the truth, Vespucci shone only by reflection from an age of glory. When compared with Columbus, Sebastian Cabot, Bartolomé Dias, and Da Gama, his place is an inferior one.

The majesty of great memories seems concentrated in the name of Christopher Columbus. It is the originality of his vast idea, the largeness and fertility of his genius, and the courage which bore up against a long series of misfortunes, which have exalted the Admiral high above all his contemporaries.