dia became more a land of mystery than ever; but this apparent misfortune proved to be the beginning of a new and brighter era.

The learned Christians of Constantinople, with nothing but their heads and their books, fled in exile into Italy, and became its schoolmasters. At once began there the revival of learning, which soon extended throughout the West. "Westward the star of empire takes its way." The Medici family of Italy, at Venice and Florence, welcomed these learned Greeks, and bought their precious manuscripts of ancient lore. The gunpowder of Europe had already silenced the Greek fire of Asia. On the Rhine the young printing press was just giving forth the first sheets. The compass and the astrolabe, recent inventions, began now to give confidence to mariners and teach them that, though the old paths of trade overland were closed, they might venture on new ones over sea. In 1453, in Western Europe there was no tea, no coffee, no tobacco, no Indian corn, no potatoes; and many of the necessities of our day were not even known as luxuries. Though the Crusades had failed in their immediate objects, they had exposed the secrets of the India trade, and the vast revenues of the Eastern cities. The manuscript travels of Marco Polo and Mandeville had found their way into the hands of thinking men. Venice was already waning, preparatory to yielding its trade to Portugal, the then most rising and active maritime power. Prince Henry the Navigator had still ten years to live to carry out his great schemes of discovery and exploration of the western coast of Africa. was an ambitious student of geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, and navigation, and for almost forty years had stood alone. At the

He

early age of fifteen he had a successful brush with the Moors at Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar; and by 1418 had crept down the coast of Africa to Cape Nun, lat. 28° 40', the southern boundary of Morocco. In 1434 his captains doubled Cape Boyador, and seven years after obtained from Pope Martin V a grant to the crown of Portugal of all he should discover from this cape to the Indies. In 1442 Rio del Oro was reached, and gold and negro slaves brought back. These were two real stimulants to Portuguese discovery, avarice, pride, and wealth, though the conversion of the infidels to Christianity, was, no doubt, a strong additional motive power. The reintroduction of negro slavery, and the part it soon played in commerce and the world's progress, may be ascribed to Prince Henry. He encouraged the traffic, which, with the love of gold and the hatred of the Moors, aroused his countrymen to his projects, and insured the promotion of discovery, in so much that by the time of the fall of Constantinople, his captains had reached

Cape Verde, lat. 14° 45′ N, probably a few de

grees beyond, and had exploded the old theory of a boiling belt about the equator.

In all ages there had been a prevailing notion that one might sail round Africa; but when once it was that Portuguese sailors demonstrated could cross the equator and survive, Prince Henry's vague idea of reaching the land of spices by this route was confirmed. At all events, he was schooling hardy sailors, and training them for bolder work, so that soon after the date of the fall of Constantinople, Italy and Portugal had reached that turn for adventure and enterprise, which spread like wildfire throughout the other States of Europe, and caused the entire revolution in the commerce of the world.

In 1453, Columbus was a lad of six years at Genoa, Vespucci of two years at Florence, and John Cabot a youth at Venice. The new learning at once took deep root. When these three Italian boys became men, behold how changed! The sciences of mathematics, astronomy, and navigation had grown with their growth, and developed with marvelous rapidity. The press had spread broadcast the learning of the ancients. The secrets of the earth were inquired into and revealed. Many islands of the Atlantic had been discovered and described, and sailors knew the coasts of Europe and Africa from Iceland to Cape Verde. But, above all, the knowledge of the sphericity of our earth was no longer confined to philosophers. Alexander had told Aristotle what he knew of the East, and Aristotle had written down that there was but a small space of sea between Spain and the eastern coast of India. Strabo had said that nothing stood in the way of a westerly passage from Spain to India but the great breadth of the Atlantic Ocean; but Seneca said this sea might be passed in a few days with favorable winds. Pomponius Mela and Macrobius put in like testimony, with certain difficulties about passing

bein

shapurning zones, and the earth

like an egg floating in water. All these opinions were rehashed and digested by Ptolemy of Alexandria, in the second century, who first properly reduced the globe into 360 degrees of latitude and longtitude. In latitude he was as correct as he was incorrect in his longitude. Roger Bacon, an Englishman, again summarized these theories in his Opus Majus, in the thirteenth century; and in the fifteenth century Pierre d'Ailly, a Frenchman, reviewed the whole question, bringing together the opinions of the ancient writers named, as well as the fathers of

the church, including modern philosophers, travelers, and theologians, especially Roger Bacon, Marco Polo, and Gerson, and gave to the world his well-known Imago Mundi. This celebrated work, finished in 1410, was afterwards the guide, companion and friend of Columbus. The learned author was Provost of the ancient Ecclesiastical College of St Dié in Lorraine, away up in the Vosges Mountains, in the remotest corner of France. This was on the very spot where, nearly a century later, in the Gymnasium within the same precincts, a confraternity of some half dozen earnest students, lovers of geography, of whom the poet Mathias Ringman was the soul, in a little work called Cosmographic Introductio, printed there in May, 1507, suggested that the New World should be named AMERICA, after a man, inasmuch as Europe and Asia had been named after women. Thus a little mountain town of France first gave aid and comfort to Columbus and afterwards a name to the New World.

As early as 1474, Paul Toscanelli a learned physician of Florence, sent to Columbus the Chart of Marco Polo, and was in correspondence with him on these very subjects, showing that even then the plans of Columbus were maturing. In 1478, the great geographical work of Ptolmey, with the 27 beautiful copper plate maps, was printed at Rome, and about the same time many other of the ancient historians, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers saw the light. The Imago Mundi was printed at Louvain, in 1483, and there still exists at Seville, Columbus' own copy, with many of his manuscript notes, discovered and described about forty years ago by our countryman, Washington Irving.

Meanwhile, the work of discovery and exploration was earnestly pursued by the Portu

guese. In 1454 Prince Henry secured the services of Cadamosto, an intelligent Venetian, well acquainted with the trade of the East, and sent him down the coast of Africa, where he reduced the explorations and trade to order, and pushed southward the discoveries to Sierra Leone in 1463, the year of Henry's death, and the capture of Gibralter by Spain from the Moors. Kings Alphonso and John continued these discoveries with so much energy that, after passing Congo, the bold captain, Bartholomew Diaz, reached the Cape of Good Hope, and looked beyond it, in 1487, thus completing an exploration of some six thousand miles of coast line in seventy years. Bartholomew Columbus was in this expediton.

Meanwhile King John had sent overland through Egypt, Pedro de Covilham, to India and Eastern Africa to gain information and report. In 1487 he reported that he had visited Ormuz, Goa, Calicut, &c., and had seen pepper and ginger, and heard of cloves and cinnamon. He visited the eastern coast of Africa, went down as far as Sofala, and returning northward, sent a message to King John that he had learned for certain that if Diaz should pursue his course round Africa he would reach India over the Eastern Ocean via Sofala. This theoretical discovery of Covilham exactly coincided with the practical one of Diaz.

All these events were but leading up to the grandest discovery the world ever knew, but it is difficult to trace the precise origin and the gradual development of the plans of Columbus. We know, however, that at the early age of fourteen he went to sea, educated with small knowledge of Latin and less Greek; and in 1474, at the age of twenty-seven, was in correspondence with Toscanelli, and became the father of Diego, the boy for whom, some ten years