United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then at an appointed day all the men n. g. t. d. and c. begin gradually, secretly, cannily, to buy up in all those places all the lac-dye or something of the kind that you and I thought there was about thirty pounds of in creation. This done mercator raises the price of lac-dye or what not throughout Europe.
The great object at this time, was to contrive such a chart in plano, with short lines, that all places might be truly laid down according to their respective longitudes and latitudes. A method of this kind had been obscurely pointed at by Ptolemy; but the first map on this plan was made by Mercator, about the year 1550.
The maps of the world by Mercator of Leyden, published on a large scale, together with many astronomical and geographical charts, delineations of exploration, and other scientific works, at the magnificent printing establishment of William Blaeuw, in Amsterdam, the friend and pupil of Tycho Brahe, and the first in that line of typographers who made the name famous, constituted an epoch in cosmography.
Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only been at Shakspeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in Bohemia, as if Shakspeare's world were one which Mercator could have projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakspearian of any other.
The maps of the world by Mercator of Leyden, published on a large scale, together with many astronomical and geographical charts, delineations of exploration, and other scientific works, at the magnificent printing establishment of William Blaeuw, in Amsterdam, the friend and pupil of Tycho Brahe, and the first in that line of typographers who made the name famous, constituted an epoch in cosmography.
Tiberis ... quamlibet magnorum navium ex Italo mari capax, rerum in toto orbe nascentium mercator placidissimus, pluribus probe solus quam ceteri in omnibus terris amnes accolitur aspiciturque villis. Nullique fluviorum minus licet, inclusis utrinque lateribus: nec tamen ipse pugnat, quamquam creber ac subitis incrementis, et nusquam magis aquis quam in ipsa urbe stagnantibus.
Ortelius directed his studies and his learning to the elucidation of ancient geography; and according to Malte Bran, no incompetent judge, he may yet be consulted on this subject with advantage. But modern geography may most probably be dated from the time of Mercator: he published an edition of Ptolemy, in which he pointed out the imperfection of the system of the ancients.
In the far-away days, when Neversink was, but the twin beacon-towers that now watch upon its heights were not, when Sandy Hook was a hook only, and not a telegraph-station, from which the first glimpse of an inward-bound argosy is winked by lightning right in at the window of the down-town office where Mercator sits jingling the coins in his trousers' pockets, in those days, the only excursion-boats that rocked upon the ground-swell over the pale, sandy reaches of the Fishing-Banks were the tiny barklets that shot out on calm days from the sweeping coves, with their tawny tarred-and-feathered crews: for of such grotesque result of the decorative art of Lynch doth ever remind me the noble Indian warrior in his plumes and paint.
Ortilius of Antwerp, and Gerard Mercator of Rupelmonde, were two of the greatest geographers of the sixteenth century; and the reform in the calendar at the end of that period gave stability to the calculations of time, which had previously suffered all the inconvenient fluctuations attendant on the old style.
MERCATOR. A more irregular ring-plain of about the same area, adjoining Campanus on the S.W. Its rampart is somewhat lower, and is partially broken on the N. by two semi-rings, and on the S. by a gap. The E. wall extends on the S. far beyond the limits of the formation, and terminates in a brilliant mountain mass 6000 feet in height.
Word Of The Day