Christy: The Silver Map of the World 359 covered thing to its relation with what succeeding generations may find to be the truth. The man who finds out something about which he knew nothing, be he scientist, scholar, or merely a sailing-master, does not try to guess what those who come after him will know about it; if he is wise he will rest content with the effort to fit the new thing into its proper place in relation to what is already known. When Martin Fro- bisher sailed between two headlands in a part of the world where no one so far as he knew had ever been before, he did not try to construct the prospective Admiralty chart of Davis Strait. He took the best maps of the world available when he sailed from England, and, because he was a man who had done things which taught him the probable values of contemporary cartographic evidence, the additions which he made to those maps were a surprisingly close approximation to what is now known to be the actual lay of the land and water in the northwestern Atlantic. If the home-keeping students who appropriated the result of his voyages and made them a part of the general stock of European in- formation had been content to read Frobisher's data carefully, as it was represented on the maps drawn by men who worked under his immediate influence, geographical progress would have been spared the delay of two centuries of mistaken notion regarding the coast line of southern Green- land. Mr. Miller Christy, in his essay on "The Silver Map of Drake's Voyage," shows some of the ways in which this misconception arose and what its results have been. The story is an instructive lesson for every student who feels a call to explain and elucidate the apparent errors of his predecessors. Mr. Christy's work is in many respects one of the most suggestive of recent essays in geographical history. His subject is a silver medal- lion, commemorative of Drake's circumnavigation voyage of 1577- 1580, which was probably designed by the same " F. G." who signed the exquisite and engraved map issued with Hakluyt's edition of Peter Martyr's De Orhe Novo in 1587. The medallion, which has hitherto been virtually unknown to students of cartography, shows a tracing of Drake's route, with the names of the more important places visited dur- ing the first English voyage around the world. Besides a photographic facsimile of the medallion, Mr. Christy illustrates his arguments with a number of contemporary maps, two of which have not been before available to students outside of London. One is an extremely interest- ing sailing chart prepared by William Borough, which appears to have been used by Frobisher in charting his discoveries during the voyage of 1576. The other is a projection, drawn by Mr. J. W. Addison, re- producing for the first time the North Atlantic configuration on the Molineux Globe in the Middle Temple, London. Aside from the maps, Mr. Christy's essay is especially useful as an illustration of the import- ance of considering contemporary events in their mutual relations. Francis Drake we commonly think of as a freebooter and circumnavi- gator ; Frobisher was a searcher for the northwest passage and the gold mines thereabout ; Zeno the younger was or was not a prince of impos-
