In the little town of St. Die in the east of France there was printed in the year 1507 a "Cosmographias Introductio"--an introduction to a forthcoming edition of Ptolemy--in which was included an account of the journeys of one Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with the discovery of a new part of the world--a fourth continent. For this reason, the author recites, "quarta orbis pars, quam quis Americus invenit, Amerigen quasi Americi terram, sivi Americam nuncupare licit." And so the name America (for it was thought proper to give it the feminine form, "cum et Europa et Asia a mulieribus sua sortitae sint nomina") was probably first pronounced in the mountain-circled town of St. Die, where the scholars of the Vosges, shut away from the sea and its greedy rumors of India, conceived more accurately in their isolation the significance of the western discoveries and made the new-found shores the edge not of Asia but of another continent. Perhaps this new land should have been given some other name; but that it is futile now to discuss. America it has been these four hundred years and America it is doubtless always to be. And it is particularly gratifying to one who has come to care so much for France to find that the name of his own land--a name most euphonious and delectable to his ears--came of the christening at the font of the River Meurthe, the beautiful French dame of St. Die standing by as godmother, and that that name was first whispered to the world by the trees of the forests of the Vosges, whose wood may even have furnished the blocks to fashion first its letters. So may we go back and write this interesting if not important fact of French pioneering in America. But let us rehearse to ourselves once more before we separate the epic sequence of adventure and suffering which tells how much more than a name France gave to that continent just rising from the seas when the savants of St. Die touched her face with the baptismal water of their recluse learning. Again the "boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky"--the America not of the imaging of the mountain men of St. Die but of the seeing and enduring of the seamen of Dieppe and St. Malo and Rochelle and Rouen.