One of the first German geographers of the century, and now justly famed as one of the most distinguished of the period, was Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470-1522 ca.), whose name, according to the practice of the time, was classicized as Hylacomylus.[142] So significant was the influence of Waldseemüller in the mapping of the New World that a somewhat detailed word concerning him may here well be given. When Duke René of Lorraine (1451-1508) became a patron of learning, with particular interest in cosmography or geography, the cartographical studies of the Germans began to have a place of far-reaching importance. It was under this enlightened duke that the little town of St. Dié became a center of culture. Here was organized the Vosgian Gymnasium,[143] a society of learned men not unlike the Platonic Academy of Florence or the Danubian Society, Vienna. Of this St. Dié coterie none was more prominent than Jean Bassin de Sandacourt,[144] the translator of the ‘Four Voyages’ of Amerigo Vespucci from the French into the Latin, Lud, the ducal secretary and author of an important little work of but few pages, which he called ‘Speculi orbis succinciss ...,’[145] and Waldseemüller, the professor of cosmography, the author of the ‘Cosmographiae Introductio ...,’[146] and a cartographer of great skill, who, with Ringmann, planned and carried well on toward completion, as early as 1507 or 1508, an edition of Ptolemy, which in 1513 was printed in the city of Strassburg.[147] It probably was as early as 1505 that the plan was under consideration for a new translation of Ptolemy from the Greek into the Latin, and that thought perhaps had its inspiration in the letters of Vespucci, in which he gave an account of his four voyages, and in the new chart which but recently had fallen into the hands of Ringmann. These charts, says Lud, in his ‘Speculum,’ came from Portugal, which, if true, leads one to the belief that they exhibited genuine Vespucian data.[148] Whatever the truth concerning the origin of these charts, that determination became a starting point for a most important evolution in cartographical history of the world.[149] In April, 1507, Waldseemüller had written to his friend, Amerbach, in Basel, “Non credo te latere nos Ptholomei cosmographiam, recognitio et adiectis quibusdam novis tabulis impressuros in oppido Divi Deodati.... Solidum quod ad generale Ptholomei paravimus nondum impressum est, erit autem impressum infra mensis spacium.”[150] “I think you know already that I am on the point of printing in the town of St. Dié (Lorraine), the Cosmography of Ptolemy, after having added to the same some new maps.... the globe comprising Ptolemy in general, which we have prepared, is not yet printed, but will be so in a month.” While great interest centers in these “new maps,” prepared for the proposed edition of Ptolemy, a greater interest now centers in the map to which Waldseemüller repeatedly alludes in the years 1507-1511, especially in his