Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/170

 first important maps, besides Cassini's, which adopted the Paris meridian were that of Capitaine (1789), and that of De Belleyme (1791).

This over-patriotic selection by the English and French was a bad precedent. The Low Countries must have their meridian at Amsterdam, the Spaniards at Madrid (having previously tried Teneriffe and Cadiz), the Portuguese at Lisbon, the Russians at the Poulkowa Observatory, the United Sates at the Washington Observatory, the Chilians at Santiago, the Brazilians at Rio de Janeiro, and so on.

These divers pretensions are deplorable, and cause no end of confusion, and it is time that a single meridian were established. M. de Chancourtois, in his "System of Geography," which was presented to the Paris Geographical Society in 1874, proposed to adopt the meridian of the island of St. Michael, in the Azores, which he holds to have been Ptolemy's first meridian; which was the meridian adopted by Mercator; and which to him appears to be preferable to all other meridians because it traverses the ocean throughout one-half of its length, and in the other half only touches the eastern extremity of Asia, thus constituting a sufficiently exact dividing line between the two main continents, the old and the new. The late M. Henri Longpérier proposed a meridian traversing the center of Europe, crossing Dalmatia and the Adriatic, and pretty accurately dividing the Eastern from the Western world.

Again, it has been proposed to establish the first meridian at Jerusalem, that center of high and honored memories; but perhaps, just on account of the religious associations, such a selection would not be approved by all nations. For our own part, we confess that we are partisans of the project offered by M. Bouthillier de Beaumont, President of the Geneva Geographical Society to the International Congress of Commercial Geography at Paris in 1878. This learned geographer proposes the selection of the meridian passing through Behring Strait on the one side of the globe, and 10° east of Paris on the other. It would on the one hand separate the two great continents, and on the other would in Europe follow the line of demarkation between the "Eastern" and the "Western" nations.

We highly approve this idea of fixing the first meridian exactly 10° east of Paris: the conversion of determinations of longitude reckoned from Paris and Ferro—which are very numerous—would be thus facilitated. This meridian would pass through Venice and would be very near to Rome, both places dear to the historian and of profound interest to the geographer. Nevertheless, we must not take for the starting-point a place belonging to any particular state, for fear of exciting again those national rivalries which have led to the fixing of such a number of national meridians. But the mediator which we propose, in unison with M. Bouthillier de Beaumont, passes also through the island of Levanzo, off the west coast of Sicily. Might not the Italian Government cede this islet to the world of science, to form the site