then was but a step beyond that which had preceded it;
Columbus was the first to steer boldly from shore into the waste of
waters, an originator, not a mere improver.

COLUMBUS'S THEORY.

Fernando Columbus divides into three classes the grounds on which his
father's theory was based; namely, reasons from nature, the authority of
writers, and the testimony of sailors. He believed the world to be a
sphere; he under-estimated its size; he over-estimated the size of the
Asiatic continent. The farther that continent extended to the eastward the
nearer it came round towards Spain. And this, in a greater or less degree,
had been the opinion of the ancient geographers. Both Aristotle and Seneca
thought that a ship might sail "in a few days" from Cadiz to India.
Strabo, too, believed that it might be possible to navigate on the same
parallel of latitude, due west from the coast of Africa or Spain to that
of India. The accounts given by Marco Polo and Sir John Maundeville of
their explorations towards China confirmed the exaggerated idea of the
extent of Eastern Asia.

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 a