appears to be generally accepted that to the report of that remarkable circumnavigation, to the letters of Cortes respecting his Mexican expedition,[203] and to the failure of his and of other Spanish attempts to find a strait north of the equator through which one might pass from Oceanus Occidentalis to Oceanus Orientalis,[204] the changed conception of the geography of the New World was due. [Illustration: Fig. 47 Bartholomew Columbus Sketch Map, 1506.] This changed conception seems to have found first expression, on a map, in a little volume prepared by Franciscus Monachus, a friar of Mechlin, about 1525. The title of this volume reads in part,[205] ‘De orbis situ ac descriptione. ad Reuerendiss. D. archiepiscopum Panormitanum, Francisci, Monachi ordinis Franciscani, epistola sane quã luculenta ...’ ‘A very excellent letter from Franciscus, a monk of the Franciscan Order, to the Most Reverend Archbishop of Palermo, touching the site and description of the world,’ with a colophon reading “Excudebat Martinus Caesar, expensis honesti viri Rolandi Bollaert ...” “Martinus Caesar prepared this at the expense of the upright man Roland Bollert.” Its two small woodcut maps representing the world in hemispheres, respectively the Old and the New World (Fig. 48), are of striking historical interest, while the text contains many references which are of importance for the light they cast upon the geographical opinions of the time respecting the New World. Here, as noted, the New World is first represented on a map as having distinctly an Asiatic connection, the southern continent (South America) being separated from the northern only by that narrow strait which we find so prominently represented on the Maiollo map of 1527, and there called “stretto dubitoso.”[206] While these hemispheres cannot themselves be referred to as a globe, they may serve to give us a general idea of the geographical representations on the globe, which, as appears probable, was at that time constructed by the author of the text. To the Ecclesiastical Prince, to whom Franciscus dedicated his little volume, information was sent concerning his globe on which he had drawn by hand a map of the world as he said, the reply to his letter containing the following statement, “Orbis globum, in quo terrae ac maria luculenter depicta sunt, una cum epistola accepimus.” “We accept the globe of the world on which the land and the seas are elegantly depicted, together with the epistle.”[207] Being a gift it would seem reasonable to conclude that the globe was not duplicated and offered for sale and that the example referred to was therefore probably unique. The text of the ‘De orbis situ ...,’ as it appears, was printed because it was thought there was much contained therein that was new and not in harmony with geographical ideas hitherto expressed. The first edition was undated, nor was the second dated, but it agreed in practically all particulars with the first excepting a slight