SPHERES, according to the Ptolomaick System, 8 Inches Diameter. Price 1l. 10s.” [115] The following works may be cited for further reference to these early Chinese globes of Peking: Wylie, A. Mongol astronomical instruments in Peking. (In: Chinese Researches, Shantung, 1897, Part III, pp. 1-20.); Le Comte, L. D. Memories and Observations. London, 1699; Du Halde, J. B. Description géographique de l’empire de la China. Paris, 1735; Yule, H. Travels of Marco Polo. London, 1893. Vol. I, pp. 448-456, with four illustrations. [116] Carton, Abbé C. Biographique sur le Père Ferdinand Verbiest. Bruges, 1839; Thompson, J. Illustrations of China and its people. London, 1874. Vol. iv. Chapter XII Globes and Globe Makers of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century--from Delisle to Ferguson Activities of Guillaume Delisle.--Jean Dominique Cassini and his reforms.--Vincenzo Miot.--The globes of Gerhard and Leonhard Valk.--Activities of John Senex.--Nicolas Bion.--The armillary sphere of Carmelo Cartilia.--Mattheus Seutter of Augsburg.--Robert Morden.--Jean Antoine Nollet.--Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr of Nürnberg.--Terrestrial globe of Cusani.--Terrestrial globes of Siena.--The work of the monk Pietro Maria da Vinchio.--James Ferguson of Scotland. Among the numerous globe makers of the eighteenth century, there are few, if any, entitled to rank with Blaeu or Hondius, with Greuter or Coronelli of the seventeenth. There was much written during the period, it is true, on the value of globes in geographical and astronomical studies, and there were many globes constructed, of which a very considerable number still have a place in our libraries, museums, and private collections. With the improvements in scientific map construction, improvements amounting to a complete reformation, and ushered in during the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening years of the eighteenth, by such men as Riccioli, Picard, Cassini, and Delisle, not to mention a number of their distinguished immediate predecessors and contemporaries, the last above-named working through the patronage of the Royal Academy of Science of France,[117]--with these improvements there appears to have been a decline in the relative value which the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries set upon globes. Once regarded as an essential part of a seaman’s instruments for use in navigation, they gave place, just as the portolan chart of the earlier day gave place, to an improved sailor’s chart. Globe makers, however, of this period, such as Delisle and Bion, as Gerhard and Leonhard Valk, as Vaugondy and Fortin, as Ferguson and Adams, have an honorable place in the history of globes and of globe construction.