Yet, apart from these references, there is but little evidence of the new discoveries forthcoming, and, from a critical point of view, Fra Mauro's planisphere is somewhat disappointing. True it is in certain regions (its Mediterranean and Black Sea, for instance), of the portolano type, but in the more outlying parts of the world, and even in much of Africa, it is far more similar to one of the old Macrobius type of wheel-maps (continued in such fifteenth-century specimens[281] as the "Borgian" design of _c._ 1430), than to a specimen of enlightened cartography like the "Laurentian" example of 1351. The traditional centre at Jerusalem is not taken, but a point slightly north of Babylon serves instead. In Africa numerous tribes and cities are marked even beyond the Equator, in regions inscribed as "Inhabitabiles propter calorem;" but the general shape of the west coast is hardly satisfactory. Fra Mauro knows nothing of the great bend of the Guinea coast; N.W. Africa appears not as a great projection, but only as a gently-sloping shoulder of land; Cape Verde is not the westernmost point of the Continent. This position is given to the traditional "Promontory of Seven Mountains" (north of the Western Nile), which we have met with in earlier examples. To the south of the Green Cape appears a long and narrow inlet of sea,[282] which can hardly be supposed to represent in any way the South coast of "Guinea" from Sierra Leone to Benin, but perhaps is a combination and exaggeration of the great estuaries so recently visited by Henry's seamen--the Gambia, the Casamansa, the Rio Grande or Geba, and others. The Western or Negro Nile is drawn as flowing straight from Meroe in Nubia to the Atlantic, passing through a great swamp (Lake Chad?), an elongated piece of open water in the country of Melli (the Middle Niger in flood?), and the course of the Senegal. South of Cape Roxo, the coast, trending gradually south-east, exhibits a very broken contour and is fringed with many islands--evidence only too certain that the draughtsman is working by the light of imagination. Finally, although Africa is rightly conceived as on the whole projecting into the Southern Ocean, and having its length or greatest dimension from south to north rather than from east to west, it is greatly twisted out of shape by the inclination S.E., which bends round its southmost point almost to the longitude of Guzerat.[283] The general size of the Continent, however, is more accurately guessed[284] than on most maps of this or earlier time. Here Fra Mauro is nearer the truth even than the Laurentian Portolano of 1351, so far superior to the work of 1457-9 in many respects. Parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude are not indicated in the Camaldolese mappemonde, which has been sometimes referred to as "an immeasurable advance on all earlier cartography;" and the importance of this famous design, as an index to current geographical ideas, and as a