PTOLEMY.
Fac-simile of cut in Icones sive imagines virorum literis illustrium ... ex secunda recognitione Nicolai Reusneri. Argentorati, CIƆ IƆ XC, p. 1. The first edition appeared in 1587. Brunet, vol. iv., col. 1255, calls the editions of 1590 and Frankfort, 1620, inferior.
ALBERTUS MAGNUS.
Fac-simile of cut in Reusner’s Icones, Strasburg, 1590, p. 4. There is another cut in Paulus Jovius’s Elogia virorum litteris illustrium, Basle, 1575, p. 7 (copy in Harvard College Library).
MARCO POLO.
This follows an engraving in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 53. The original is at Rome. There is a copy of an old print in Jules Verne’s Découverte de la Terre.
It has been said that Macrobius, a Roman of the fifth century, in a commentary on the Dream of Scipio, had maintained a division of the globe into four continents, of which two were then unknown. In the twelfth century this idea had been revived by Guillaume de Conches (who died about 1150) in his Philosophia Minor, lib. iv. cap. 3. It was again later further promulgated in the writings of Bede and Honoré d’Autun, and in the Microcosmos of Geoffroy de Saint-Victor,—a manuscript of the thirteenth century still preserved.[88] It is not known that this theory was familiar to Columbus. The chief directors of his thoughts among anterior writers appear to have been, directly or indirectly, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Vincenzius of Beauvais;[89] and first among them, for importance, we must place the Opus Majus Of Roger Bacon, completed in 1267. It was from Bacon that Petrus de Aliaco, Or Pierre d’Ailly (b. 1340; d. 1416 or 1425), in his Ymago mundi, borrowed the passage which, in this French imitator’s language, so impressed Columbus.[90]