Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/517

 cartography in Europe in contrast with the little that was done for its improvement by the Arabs, it will be necessary to draw attention to the difference between the nature of the empire which they established and that era of maritime enterprise and commercial activity which sprang up, and after the twelfth century developed so rapidly in the cities of the Mediterranean. The Arabs had a vast empire, the great bulk of which had no connection with the sea. A highly imaginative people, they were more attracted by speculative inquiries respecting the earth as a whole, and therefore studied it more in its connection with astronomy than by those careful, patient, and practical topographical labors which constitute such an important part of geography. What could be done by astronomical observation to show the relative position of places they did; but they knew nothing of the Atlantic.

The people of the maritime cities of the Mediterranean had a field of activity very limited when compared with the great empire of the Arabs. It was the Mediterranean. Their pursuits were maritime. They were the carriers by water of products between Asia and Europe, and therefore became, what the Arabs never were, a nautical people. To them navigation and everything that tended to its improvement were of the highest interest, and they consequently gave great attention to details. They observed closely the outlines of coasts, carefully delineated them, and, as they had an eye for form and proportion, their maps, in design and execution, greatly excelled those of the Arabs.

These cosmographers knew very well the position of places to the pole, or geographical latitude, but in making their maps they drew no parallels of latitude, and paid less attention to longitude: for the mariners for whose use these maps were intended knew nothing about figures representing degrees of latitude and longitude, and they are consequently not found upon these maps. The distances on the land or over the sea were laid down from certain fixed points in the direction of the compass, and hence these maps are covered with a network of lines running in all directions from central points, called wind-roses (rose de vent), which, to persons familiar only with maps of the present day, are unintelligible.

In the fifteenth century, great acquisitions were made to the knowledge of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, by the journeys of Marco Polo and Cadamosto; and the result of this accumulation of new information was the construction, in 1457, of a large map of the world, by Fra Mauro. It was painted on the wall of a convent in Venice, and was, for its time, an admirable production.

Fra Carmelite was a friar who had established a geographical school in Venice, and whose acquisitions as a geographer were, for the time, so extensive that he received from his contemporaries the title of "the incomparable." He knew that the earth is a sphere—being well acquainted with Ptolemy, but did not follow Ptolemy's scientific method of so projecting the world as to give the longitude and latitude