Throughout all the early years of the modern period, metal globes continued to find favor, to the making of which skilled workmen in the thriving industrial centers of Southern Germany, Southeastern France, Northern Switzerland, and Northern Italy set themselves. Brass, copper, silver, and gold were employed very frequently in their construction, the last-named metals being used in the making of globes primarily for ornamental purposes.[184] Globes with manuscript maps, as before noted, seemed to find especial favor in Italy, in the making of which much artistic skill was displayed. The spheres for such globes were usually of wood either solid or hollow, of well-fashioned strips of wood, canvas covered, the whole carefully glued and braced that the spherical shape might not be affected with time. In the preparation of the sphere to receive the manuscript map, workmen proceeded much as did Behaim, pasting over its surface irregular strips of parchment or paper, adding occasionally a groundwork of paint suitable for taking the sketch of the draughtsman. As the years passed, and the engraved map found increasing favor, practically all globe balls, with exceptions as noted above, were made either of plaster shot through and through with a binding material, usually of fiber, and fashioned over a mould, or of a preparation of papier-mâché. The increasing interest in globes and globe making manifesting itself in the early years of the sixteenth century led to the devising of methods for their more rapid construction. If the opening years of the sixteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion of geographical knowledge, none the less did they witness an improvement in the making of maps wherein this expanding knowledge could fittingly be recorded. It is interesting to note how rapidly change was made from one method of map draughting to another in the search for a projection which might prove itself to be altogether suitable. As a result of this striving we have for example the projection of Donnus Nicolas Germanus employed in his maps of the geographer Ptolemy, and often referred to as the Donis projection.[185] Then we find the stereographic meridional[186] and the stereographic polar,[187] the cordiform single and double[188] which seem to have been a development from the orthographic projection well represented in the map of Johannes Stabius (Fig. 45) who appears to have been the first to give the method prominence. In addition to the projections mentioned there were many modifications, to suit the notions of the draughtsmen, which were employed in the early sixteenth century.[189] With the fuller realization of the fact that the earth is a sphere, the desire accurately to represent in the maps its spherical surface continued to seek for expression, an expression that would do least violence to the fact that the degrees of latitude and longitude vary in length, particularly those of longitude as one passes from the equator toward