CARDINAL ALIACO'S "COSMOGRAPHIA."

But of all the works of learned men, that which, according to Ferdinand
Columbus, had most weight with his father, was the "Cosmographia" of
Cardinal Aliaco. And this book affords a good illustration of the then
state of scientific knowledge. Learned arguments are interspersed with the
most absurd fables of lion-bodied men and dog-faced women; grave, and
sometimes tolerably sound, disquisitions on the earth's surface are mixed
up with the wildest stories of monsters and salamanders, of giants and
pigmies. It is here that we find the original of our modern acquaintance,
the sea-serpent, described as being "of huge size, so that he kills and
devours large stags, and is able to cross the ocean;" and the wonders of
the unknown world are enunciated with a circumstantial minuteness which
must have easily won the credence of a willing disciple like Columbus. He
was also confirmed in his views of the existence of a western passage to
the Indies by Paulo Toscanelli, the Florentine philosopher, to whom much
credit is due for the encouragement he afforded to the enterprise. That
the notices, however, of western lands were not such as to have much
weight with other men is sufficiently proved by the difficulty which
Columbus had in contending with adverse geographers and men of science in
general, of whom, he says, he never was able to convince any one. After a
new world had been discovered, many scattered indications were then found
to have foreshown it. "When he promised a new hemisphere," writes
Voltaire, "people maintained that it could not exist, and when he had
discovered it, that it had been known a long time." It was to confute such
detractors that he resorted to the well known expedient for making an egg
stand on end; an illustration of the meaning of originality which, by the
way, was not itself original, as Brunelleschi had already employed it when